A Comprehensive Approach for Classification of the Cough Type*

Identifying the presence of sputum in the lung is essential in detection of diseases such as lung infection, pneumonia and cancer. Cough type classification (dry/wet) is an effective way of examining presence of lung sputum. This is traditionally done through physical exam in a clinical visit which is subjective and inaccurate. This work proposes an objective approach relying on the acoustic features of the cough sound. A total number of 5971 coughs (5242 dry and 729 wet) were collected from 131 subjects using Smartphone. The data was reviewed and annotated by a novel multi-layer labeling platform. The annotation kappa inter-rater agreement score is measured to be 0.81 and 0.37 for 1st and 2nd layer respectively. Sensitivity and specificity values of 88% and 86% are measured for classification between wet and dry coughs (highest across the literature).Clinical Relevance— This work enables the objective classification of the presence of lung congestion based on the cough sound using a smartphone. The current method for cough type detection is subjective and at best very faulty.