Thursday, March 28, 2024

On HeAR -- Health Acoustic Representations, Google AI could soon use a person’s cough to diagnose disease

Good news! Please cough again your smartphone is listening!

"A team led by Google scientists has developed a machine-learning tool that can help to detect and monitor health conditions by evaluating noises such as coughing and breathing. The artificial intelligence (AI) system1, trained on millions of audio clips of human sounds, might one day be used by physicians to diagnose diseases including COVID-19 and tuberculosis and to assess how well a person’s lungs are functioning. ...
What’s new about the Google system — called Health Acoustic Representations (HeAR) — is the massive data set that it was trained on, and the fact that it can be fine-tuned to perform multiple tasks. ...
Instead, the Google researchers used self-supervised learning, which relies on unlabelled data. Through an automated process, they extracted more than 300 million short sound clips of coughing, breathing, throat clearing and other human sounds from publicly available YouTube videos. ...
“There’s an immense potential not only for diagnosis, but also for screening” and monitoring ..."

From the abstract:
"Health acoustic sounds such as coughs and breaths are known to contain useful health signals with significant potential for monitoring health and disease, yet are underexplored in the medical machine learning community. The existing deep learning systems for health acoustics are often narrowly trained and evaluated on a single task, which is limited by data and may hinder generalization to other tasks. To mitigate these gaps, we develop HeAR, a scalable self-supervised learning-based deep learning system using masked autoencoders trained on a large dataset of 313 million two-second long audio clips. Through linear probes, we establish HeAR as a state-of-the-art health audio embedding model on a benchmark of 33 health acoustic tasks across 6 datasets. By introducing this work, we hope to enable and accelerate further health acoustics research."

[2403.02522] HeAR -- Health Acoustic Representations

Google AI could soon use a person’s cough to diagnose disease Machine-learning system trained on millions of human audio clips shows promise for detecting COVID-19 and tuberculosis.

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