Sparse representation-based extraction of pulmonary sound components from low-quality auscultation signals

Toward assistance of respiratory system diagnosis, sparse representation of auscultation signals is utilized to extract pulmonary sound components. This signal extraction is a challenging task because the pulmonary sounds such as vesicular sounds and crackles are overlapping each other in the time and frequency domains, and they are so faint that the quality of recorded signals is quite low in many cases. It is experimentally shown that the pulmonary sound components are successfully extracted from low-quality auscultation signals via the sparse representation. This extraction method is confirmed to be highly robust against random noise and digital quantization.