Find all editions of Cough Science News below and get access to the latest cough science developments, publications, and interviews with cough experts.
01.03.2024
Key Takeaway: Based on 137 patients in Bihar, India, acoustic AI models of solicited coughs showed a signal in predicting, to some extent, whether a chest radiographic examination would have normal or abnormal results. The logistic regression model performed best, with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curves ranging from 0.7 to 0.78.
Why It Matters: Chest radiography is a valuable tool for diagnosis, but it is expensive and time-consuming, particularly in resource-constrained settings. Analyzing solicited coughs using AI-enabled algorithms could be a quick, inexpensive and widely available triage tool to determine which patients are likely to have radiographic abnormalities.
Key Takeaway: In a discrete choice experiment, frequency of cough attacks was the most important to participants, followed by taste change, then nighttime coughing, then daytime coughing. The experiment focused on two constructed treatment options characterized by varying attribute levels.
Why It Matters: Frequency of cough attacks appears to have the most damaging effect on chronic coughers’ quality of life, suggesting this measure should feature more prominently in the development of future therapies and efforts to measure their effectiveness.
Key Takeaway: Acoustic AI classifiers predict Covid status with high accuracy, but after matching on measured confounders, such as self-reported symptoms, performance is much weaker. In practical settings, the utility of audio AI classifiers for Covid status is outperformed by predictions on the basis of user-reported symptoms.
Why It Matters: Study design to reduce bias within the data, and the treatment of confounders are extremely important in AI-enabled diagnostics. This paper suggests limits on the transformation of diagnostics based on audio classifiers.
Exploring the Possibilities of Longitudinal Cough Data
Dr Judson spoke with us about his research into the rate of improvement of cough symptoms for patients being treated for active pulmonary exacerbations of sarcoidosis. The surprising speed of improvement suggests there is much more to discover about the mechanism of cough in pulmonary sarcoidosis.
“...cough monitoring in sarcoidosis, will allow for an earlier reduction in toxic medications as well as earlier evaluation of pulmonary sarcoidosis exacerbations”
Dr Marc Judson
Chief of the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Albany Medical College, NY, USA.
