arXiv AI

Beyond Classification: A Cough Regression Benchmark for Respiratory Acoustic Foundation Models

arXiv:2606. 15436v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Respiratory acoustic foundation models (FMs) excel at cough classification, yet their ability to predict continuous health quantities from cough audio remains largely unexplored, despite the clinical value of passive age, BMI, and disease probability estimation in settings where physical measurements are unavailable.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Why ML-based cough models do not generalize: a systematic cross-dataset evaluation for tuberculosis screening

The study investigates why machine‑learning models for tuberculosis screening based on cough acoustics fail to generalize across datasets. Classical ML and deep‑learning classifiers achieved moderate performance within their own datasets (ROC‑AUC up to 0.755) but performed poorly on external data, often below 0.6. The authors found that audio features were more influenced by recording device and dataset than by TB status, and that device‑diverse training improved transfer while device mismatch degraded it. A clinical‑variable baseline showed more consistent generalization, suggesting acquisition‑specific variability is a stronger driver of poor generalizability than population shift.

By Wensi Zhang, Tomas Teijeiro, J\'er\^ome Thevenot, David Atienza
arXiv AI
Aug 28

From Sound to Symptom: Real-Time Respiratory Signal Understanding for Conversational Healthcare Agents

The paper introduces HealthCUES, a real‑time streaming pipeline that extracts and analyzes cough and throat‑clearing events from live spoken conversations. It detects coughs within sub‑second latency, distinguishes cough subtypes (dry, wet, barking, whooping), differentiates coughing from throat clearing, and estimates temporal boundaries, all while gating alerts based on conversational context. The system, built on Qwen3Omni, achieves high accuracy (93% F1 for cough detection) and low latency (340 ms) and has been validated by healthcare professionals for telehealth use.

By Tanmay Laud, Herprit Mahal, Subhabrata Mukherjee
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Mitigating Stethoscope-Induced Shortcuts in Respiratory Sound Classification under Federated Domain Generalization with Causality-Inspired Interventions

The paper introduces BTS-CAFE, a federated domain generalization framework for respiratory sound classification that addresses stethoscope-induced shortcuts. It combines causality-inspired device-style interventions, counterfactual metadata augmentation, and gradient alignment to reduce style–content entanglement and promote device-invariant decision boundaries. Experiments on ICBHI and SPRSound datasets show a 3.69‑point improvement in out-of-distribution performance over the baseline and outperform conventional data augmentation and federated learning methods.

By Heejoon Koo, Yoon Tae Kim, Miika Toikkanen, June-Woo Kim
arXiv AI
Jun 9

AeroSpectra Sentinel: An Auditable LLM Prompt-Chaining Decision-Support Workflow for Acute Asthma Risk Assessment from Respiratory Sounds and Clinical Signals

arXiv:2606. 08247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Acute asthma risk assessment requires rapid interpretation of respiratory sounds, oxygenation, airflow limitation, speech ability, work of breathing, mental status, and response to reliever therapy.

By Aueaphum Aueawatthanaphisut
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 4

Subgroup performance analysis of adaptation strategies for chest X-ray foundation models

The study examines how three parameter‑efficient adaptation methods—linear heads on the raw CLS token, an MLP, and an attention‑pooling module—affect pathology classification accuracy and subgroup fairness when applied to a frozen Rad‑DINO chest X‑ray encoder. Using the MIMIC‑CXR dataset, the authors evaluate eight pathologies across race, sex, and imaging‑view subgroups, finding that attention pooling yields the best overall performance and encodes protected attributes most strongly, yet higher performance does not consistently reduce subgroup disparities. The results show that attribute encoding strength and layer choice do not reliably predict fairness outcomes, indicating that fairness must be assessed directly for each task.

By Dhruv Gupta, Emma A. M. Stanley, Fabio De Sousa Ribeiro, Sujal R. Desai, Ben Glocker