Lung Auscultation Case Study

Respiratory sounds can also define as breath sounds or lung sounds. It is generated through the turbulence of airflow in our respiratory tract. The air breath in and out are transmitted through air, liquid and solid and to the chest wall. Each properties of substance that the air attenuated lead to different degree and intensity of breath sounds (Jones, 1995a).
Breath sounds can divided into three type, normal, abnormal and diminished (Alexandra Hough, 2001). Breath sound is useful in diagnosing or monitoring respiratory disease and airway abnormalities, such as asthma, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary disease (COPD), pneumonia and so on. It can be auscultate across chest wall with a stethoscope. A physician can auscultate breath sounds to detect

Auscultation with a stethoscope need a professionally well-trained physician to recognise the abnormalities accurately. Moreover, Lung auscultation is a non-objective method, which depends on the experience, skill and sounds perception of the physician. To overcome the defect, researcher started to exploit computer-based lung sounds analysis system. Digital recording and analysis becomes the only reliable and quantitative way for diagnose the lung sounds. Studies on computer -based breath sounds started in the literature since 1980s. Nowadays there is advancement about signal processing to detect the abnormalities and disease using computer-based breath sound auscultation.
The major problem faced in studies on computerised- based lung sounds analysis is to relate the breath sounds to the disease correctly which has not been study by researcher before. Every respiratory sounds has each properties and science and technology has made breath sounds simple to improve the classification of pulmonary diseases. The pulmonary diseases have their dominant frequency range, which can detected by apply signal processing techniques (Palaniappan.R et al.