Physiological Sound Acquisition and Processing

Dear Colleagues,

Auscultation is a long-established clinical practice to listen to the internal sounds of the body, particularly heart, respiratory, and abdominal sounds. Nevertheless, despite its multiple benefits, conventional auscultation has some associated drawbacks, e.g., it needs to be performed by an expert, especially when aiming to detect abnormal sounds; it is somewhat subjective and, thus, has inherent inter-listener variability; it is conditioned by the limits of human audition and training; and it does not allow for continuous monitoring. Automated computer-aided analysis of physiological sounds could potentially overcome these limitations, as current work on the detection and classification of heart, respiratory, and bowel sounds suggest.

This Special Issue will publish high-quality original research on the automated analysis of clinically-relevant physiological sounds. Both original research and review articles on, but not limited to, the following topics of interest are welcome:

• Sound segmentation and classification algorithms;
• Audio signal processing, feature engineering, and machine learning / deep learning approaches;
• Sizeable, quality and public datasets and big data;
• New sensors and acquisition systems, e.g., wearable, portable and p-health systems targeting continuous and remote monitoring;
• Single- and multi-modal approaches and information fusion in multi-channel and multi-sensor settings;
• Impact of acquisition settings, e.g., clinical or non-clinical environments, heterogeneous sound acquisition equipment, robustness in noisy environments;
• Personalization and population stratification;
• Applications of physiological sound processing in healthcare, clinical studies, and decision-support systems.

Prof. Dr. Rui Pedro Paiva
Guest Editor

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