Artificial Intelligence Framework for Respiratory Disease Classification Using Multi-Spectral-Feature-Driven and Deep Neural Architectures

Globally, respiratory diseases such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and pneumonia affect populations significantly, requiring early and accurate diagnosis for effective clinical management. Manual auscultation and expert interpretation are the common shortcomings in conventional diagnostic approaches, as they lead to time-consuming and inconsistent analysis. To address these limitations, an artificial intelligence-driven framework for respiratory disease classification using multi-spectral feature extraction and deep learning architectures is proposed to classify four different respiratory conditions: Asthma, COPD, Pneumonia and Healthy. The dataset is collected from Kaggle’s respiratory sound database and the COUGHVID V3 database, which together contain 322 Asthma signals, 746 COPD signals, 323 Pneumonia signals and 174 Healthy signals. Subsequently, the features are extracted using four different feature extraction techniques—Constant Q Transform (CQT), a Gammatone spectrogram, Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) and Perceptual Linear Prediction (PLP)—and these extracted spectral representations are provided as inputs to various deep learning models such as a Deep Convolutional Neural Network (Deep CNN), a Temporal Attention Network (TAN) and an Autoencoder for automated feature learning and disease classification. The proposed framework is evaluated using several performance metrics, and the experimental results clearly indicate that the performance of the proposed classification framework strongly depends on the selection of spectral feature extraction techniques and deep learning models. Among all the evaluated combinations, it is evident that the Autoencoder model integrated with CQT features exhibited the best classification performance, with an accuracy of 98.72%, precision of 98.74%, recall of 98.72%, Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) of 98.11%, Cohen’s kappa value of 98.10% and the least log loss of 0.025. The proposed artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled respiratory disease classification framework has demonstrated the ability to produce a reliable computer-aided diagnostic system which is suitable for smart healthcare applications and automated pulmonary disease screening.