AI- Enhanced Stethoscope in Remote Diagnostics for Cardiopulmonary Diseases

Abstract

The increase in cardiac and pulmonary diseases presents an alarming and pervasive health challenge on a global scale responsible for unexpected and premature mortalities. In spite of how serious these conditions are, existing methods of detection and treatment encounter challenges, particularly in achieving timely diagnosis for effective medical intervention. Manual screening processes commonly used for primary detection of cardiac and respiratory problems face inherent limitations, increased by a scarcity of skilled medical practitioners in remote or under-resourced areas. To address this, our study introduces an innovative yet efficient model which integrates AI for diagnosing lung and heart conditions concurrently using the auscultation sounds. Unlike the already high-priced digital stethoscope, our proposed model has been particularly designed to deploy on low-cost embedded devices and thus ensure applicability in under-developed regions that actually face an issue of accessing medical care. Our proposed model incorporates MFCC feature extraction and engineering techniques to ensure that the signal is well analyzed for accurate diagnostics through the hybrid model combining Gated Recurrent Unit with CNN in processing audio signals recorded from the low-cost stethoscope. Beyond its diagnostic capabilities, the model generates digital audio records that facilitate in classifying six pulmonary and five cardiovascular diseases. Hence, the integration of a cost effective stethoscope with an efficient AI empowered model deployed on a web app providing real-time analysis, represents a transformative step towards standardized healthcare