Computer audition-based methods have attracted a great deal of attention in the field of disease detection due to their significant advantages, e.g., non-invasive and convenient operation. Among them, the introduction of information representations inspired by human auditory perception, e.g., Mel-frequency transformation, gives it great potential to approach and even exceed the limits of the human auditory system. However, according to previous research, it remains challenging to fairly assess whether information representations inspired by human auditory perception have a significant positive effect on disease detection. Moreover, performance differences among various information representations and their underlying causes are yet to be thoroughly investigated and analyzed. To this end, we propose an interpretable comparative study on information representations inspired by human auditory perception for disease detection. First, the detection accuracy of different information representations are investigated on two sound datasets (a psychological and a physiological disease) based on the classical model and the proposed Temporal-Spatial Multi-Scale Perception Network. Then, the noise robustness of these information representations are compared by introducing Gaussian noise with varying signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). Finally, by combining the human auditory perception mechanism and explainable AI techniques, we analyze the reasons for performance differences among various information representations from qualitative and quantitative perspectives. Experimental results demonstrate that information representations inspired by human auditory perception can improve the performance of disease detection with statistical significance. Furthermore, Gammatone Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (GFCCs) outperform other information representations by achieving the highest accuracy, particularly under noisy conditions. The interpretable results further reveal the underlying reasons for GFCC's superior performance, highlighting its ability to capture critical auditory features robustly across varying noise levels.These findings emphasize the potential of auditory perception-inspired representations in advancing computer audition-based disease detection systems and provide a solid foundation for future research in this domain.

Colorectal Cancer (CRC) is one of the leading causes of cancer-related deaths worldwide, and early screening plays a crucial role in improving patient outcomes. In this study, we present a novel AI-assisted CRC diagnostic system using Bowel Sound (BS) signals. We first develop two portable BS acquisition devices with distinct form factors for high-fidelity signal capture in both clinical and home-care scenarios. A total of 221 recordings were collected under expert-guided protocol, with 144 CRC recordings and 59 Non-CRC healthy controls using the developed device. To enable low-resource deployment, we design a lightweight deep learning model optimized for real-time, on-board inference. The model incorporates multiple training strategies, including transfer learning on a large-scale public BS dataset, self-supervised temporal feature learning, and a hybrid semi-and weakly-supervised approach that leverages both unlabeled and real-noise data. Furthermore, a Sound Event Detection (SED) attention mechanism and iterative consistency learning are introduced to enhance the model’s sensitivity to BS activity. The proposed model comprises only 264.7 K parameters and 253.2 M Floating-Point Operations (FLOPs), requiring 1.57 MB of RAM and 1.03 MB of FLASH when deployed on microcontroller. It performs inference in approximately 3.4 s with low power consumption, making it well-suited for low-resource environments. Despite its compact design, the model achieves 93.06% classification accuracy, 96.46% sensitivity, and 86.99% specificity for binary-classes in CRC diagnosis. These results demonstrate the system’s potential for accessible and cost-effective CRC screening in community, home, and rural healthcare scenarios.

The development of affective computing and medical electronic technologies has led to the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based methods for the early detection of depression. However, previous studies have often overlooked the necessity for the AI-assisted diagnosis system to be wearable and accessible in practical scenarios for depression recognition. In this work, we present an on-board executable multi-feature transfer-enhanced fusion model for our custom-designed wearable three-lead Electroencephalogram (EEG) sensor, based on EEG data collected from 73 depressed patients and 108 healthy controls. Experimental results show that the proposed model exhibits low-computational complexity (65.0 K parameters), promising Floating-Point Operations (FLOPs) performance (25.6 M), real-time processing (1.5 s/execution), and low power consumption (320.8 mW). Furthermore, it requires only 202.0 KB of Random Access Memory (RAM) and 279.6 KB of Read-Only Memory (ROM) when deployed on the EEG sensor. Despite its low computational and spatial complexity, the model achieves a notable classification accuracy of 95.2%, specificity of 94.0%, and sensitivity of 96.9% under independent test conditions. These results underscore the potential of deploying the model on the wearable three-lead EEG sensor for assisting in the diagnosis of depression.

Heart sounds play a crucial role in assessing Coronary Artery Disease (CAD). The advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies has given rise to Computer Audition (CA)-based methods for CAD detection. However, previous research has focused primarily on analyzing and modeling heart sound data, overlooking practical application scenarios. In this work, we design a pervasive heart sound collection device used for high-quality heart sound data acquisition. Moreover, we introduce an on-board executable lightweight network tailored for the designed portable device, referred to as TYKDModel. Further, heart sound data from 41 CAD patients and 22 non-CAD healthy controls are collected using the developed device. Experimental results show that the TYKDModel exhibits low-computational complexity, with 52.16 K parameters and 5.03 M Floating-Point Operations (FLOPs). When deployed on the board, it requires only 1.10 MB of Random Access Memory (RAM) and 236.27 KB of Read-Only Memory (ROM), and takes around 1.72 seconds to perform a classification. Despite the low computational and spatial complexity, the TYKDModel achieves a notable classification accuracy of 85.2%, specificity of 88.6%, and sensitivity of 82.8% on the board. These results indicate the promising potential of AI-assisted all-in-one integrated system for the diagnosis of heart sound-assisted CAD.

The cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) cause tremendous deaths yearly. The Mel-spectrogram is widely used as a tool to analyse the heart sound, which facilitate a cheap and efficient diagnosis of CVDs. Nevertheless, the amplitude and frequency responses of the Mel filter banks remain constant, limiting its function to frequency selection. We propose an adaptive Melspectrogram end-to-end neural network (AMNet) for a better characterisation and classification of heart sound in the work. The core of the adaptive Mel-spectrograms (AMel) lies in an adaptive Mel filter banks whose frequency characteristics remain the same as the original Mel-spectrogram (OMel) and amplitude is learnt by the backropagation algorithm. The AMNet learns the raw audio representation directly and outputs the classification results. It reaches 43.5% Unweighted Average Recall (UAR) and surpasses the model with the OMel and the baseline by 6% UAR. It is demonstrated that the AMel characterises the heart sound more effectively.