Lung water detection using acoustic techniques

The presence of an excessive amount of water in lung is a sign of pulmonary edema which can be caused by heart failure. The current solutions for lung water detection involve the use of X-ray, CT scan or serum biomarkers, which require bulky and expensive instruments as well as long measurement duration. This paper reports on a study conducted on the use of a different sensing modality to detect the presence of water in lung. The main contributions of the paper are twofold: 1) we propose to employ acoustic (or sound) based techniques for lung water detection. The design is simple and can be implemented on a portable or wearable system; 2) we establish the feasibility of sound-based techniques for lung water detection, by carrying out experimental studies using four feature extraction methods combined with two classification methods. The findings of this study will be beneficial to the design of portable devices for rapid and accurate lung water detection.