WED: An efficient wheezing-episode detector based on breath sounds spectrogram analysis

An enhanced method for the detection of wheezes, based on the spectrogram of the breath sound recordings is proposed. The identification of wheezes in the total breath cycle would contribute to the diagnosis of pathologies related to patients with obstructive airway diseases. Fast and quite simple techniques are applied to automatically locate and identify wheezing-episodes. Amplitude criteria are applied to the peaks of the spectrogram in order to discriminate the wheezing from the breath sound, whereas frequency and time continuity criteria are used to improve the results. The proposed detector could be used for long-term wheezing screening in sleep-laboratories, resulting in significant data-volume reduction.