Lung sound signal (LSS) measurements are taken to aid in the diagnosis of various diseases. Their interpretation is difficult however due to the presence of interference generated by the heart. Novel digital signal processing techniques are therefore proposed to automate the removal of the heart sound signal (HSS) interference from the LSS measurements. The HSS is first assumed to be a periodic...

Two of the primary cues used to localize the sources of sounds are interaural level differences (ILDs) and interaural time differences (ITDs). We conducted two experiments to explore how practice affects the human discrimination of values of ILDs and ongoing ITDs presented over headphones. We measured discrimination thresholds of 13 to 32 naive listeners in a variety of conditions during a pret...

We study an invasion percolation process on Cayley trees and find that the dynamics of perimeter growth is strongly dependent on the nature of the invasion process, as well as on the underlying tree structure. We apply this process to model the inflation of the lung in the airway tree, where crackling sounds are generated when airways open. We define the perimeter as the interface between the c...

BACKGROUND There is an urgent need to develop new outcome measures for respiratory therapy, to evaluate its effectiveness. Adventitious sounds generated from the lungs (crackles and wheezes), can now be quantified and characterized objectively with computer technology. To our knowledge, this is the first reported study designed to assess any change in lung crackles before and after a single se...

Temporal variation in listeners' sensitivity to interaural time and level differences (ITD and ILD, respectively) was measured for sounds of different carrier frequency using the temporal weighting function (TWF) paradigm [Stecker and Hafter (2002) J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 112,1046-1057]. Listeners made lateralization judgments following brief trains of filtered impulses (Gabor clicks) presented ove...

In this study, a new method is proposed to assess heart and lung signal quality objectively automatically on 5-level scale in real-time, the effect of vital sign estimation. A total 207 10 s long chest sounds were taken from 119 preterm full-term babies. Thirty recordings ten subjects obtained with synchronous signs Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). As reference, seven annotators independent...