A novel multimodal framework for early diagnosis and classification of COPD based on CT scan images and multivariate pulmonary respiratory diseases

Comput Methods Programs Biomed. 2024 Jan:243:107911. doi: 10.1016/j.cmpb.2023.107911. Epub 2023 Nov 10.

Abstract

Background and objective: Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is one of the world's worst diseases; its early diagnosis using existing methods like statistical machine learning techniques, medical diagnostic tools, conventional medical procedures, and other methods is challenging due to misclassification results of COPD diagnosis and takes a long time to perform accurate prediction. Due to the severe consequences of COPD, detection and accurate diagnosis of COPD at an early stage is essential. This paper aims to design and develop a multimodal framework for early diagnosis and accurate prediction of COPD patients based on prepared Computerized Tomography (CT) scan images and lung sound/cough (audio) samples using machine learning techniques, which are presented in this study.

Method: The proposed multimodal framework extracts texture, histogram intensity, chroma, Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs), and Gaussian scale space from the prepared CT images and lung sound/cough samples. Accurate data from All India Institute Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Raipur, India, and the open respiratory CT images and lung sound/cough (audio) sample dataset validate the proposed framework. The discriminatory features are selected from the extracted feature sets using unsupervised ML techniques, and customized ensemble learning techniques are applied to perform early classification and assess the severity levels of COPD patients.

Results: The proposed framework provided 97.50%, 98%, and 95.30% accuracy for early diagnosis of COPD patients based on the fusion technique, CT diagnostic model, and cough sample model.

Conclusion: Finally, we compare the performance of the proposed framework with existing methods, current approaches, and conventional benchmark techniques for early diagnosis.

Keywords: Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD); Classification; Computed Tomography (CT); Deep learning; Lung sound; Texture.

MeSH terms

  • Cough
  • Early Diagnosis
  • Humans
  • Lung Diseases*
  • Pulmonary Disease, Chronic Obstructive* / diagnostic imaging
  • Respiratory Sounds
  • Tomography, X-Ray Computed / methods