COUGHVID: A cough-based COVID-19 fast screening project

Overview:

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, mass coronavirus testing has proven essential to governments in monitoring the spread of the disease, isolating infected individuals, and effectively “flattening the curve” of infections over time. However, this oropharyngeal swab test is physically invasive and must be performed by a trained clinician. This requires patients to travel to a laboratory facility to get tested, thereby potentially infecting others along the way. Ideally, testing would be performed noninvasively at no cost, and administered at the homes of potential patients to minimize contamination risk.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has reported that 67.7% of COVID-19 patients exhibit a “dry cough,” which may be audibly different from coughs caused by other pathologies. Such cough sounds analysis has proven successful in diagnosing respiratory conditions like pertussis, asthma, and pneumonia.

At the Embedded Systems Laboratory (ESL) at EPFL, we have developed the COUGHVID database, which is an extensive dataset of COVID-19 cough sounds from around the world, partially validated by expert pulmonologists. We contribute our data, signal preprocessing source code, cough classification algorithm, and feature extraction methods to assist the global research community in developing algorithms to automatically screen for COVID-19 based on cough sounds.

How to use it:

Notebooks

The example_adapted.ipynb

1. Source code
   1. DSP

This file contains all digital signal processing functions, including filtering the recordings and classifying between cough and non-cough sounds.

Features

This file contains all of the functions used for the computation of audio signal features commonly used in cough classification.

Models

The cough_classifier is an XGB model that can be loaded and used in the classify_cough function to classify whether or not a given recording contains cough sounds. The cough_classification_scaler is a feature scaler also used in this function.

Citation

Please cite <our publication here>

Contact

For questions or suggestions, please contact coughvid@epfl.ch

To donate a COVID-19 cough sound to our database, please visit [the COUGHVID website](coughvid.epfl.ch)