WIPSNet: Deep Learning for Paediatric Wheeze Detection from Overnight Impedance Pneumography
Overnight impedance pneumography (IP) is used to monitor paediatric respiratory health. Its current clinical readout, the Expiratory Variability Index (EVI), compresses each IP recording into a single scalar and achieves an AUC of 0.633 for night-level wheeze classification. We introduce Wheeze Impedance Pneumography Scalogram Network (WIPSNet), a 3D ResNet operating on stacked continuous wavelet transform scalograms of overnight IP signals. On a 15-patient cohort (60 nights, 281 hours), WIPSNet achieves an AUC of $0.783 \pm 0.026$, outperforming EVI, a state-space model (Mamba), and two modern sleep-staging architectures. Performance peaks at a volumetric depth corresponding to 32 minutes of temporal context, suggesting that multi-scale temporal aggregation is important for modelling nocturnal respiratory dynamics. Overall, these results indicate that structured time-frequency representations combined with 3D convolutional architectures provide an effective approach for learning from long, irregular physiological time series.