An explainable COVID-19 detection system based on human sounds

Acoustic signals generated by the human body have often been used as biomarkers to diagnose and monitor diseases. As the pathogenesis of COVID-19 indicates impairments in the respiratory system, digital acoustic biomarkers of COVID-19 are under investigation. In this paper, we explore an accurate and explainable COVID-19 diagnosis approach based on human speech, cough, and breath data using the power of machine learning. We first analyze our design space considerations from the data aspect and model aspect. Then, we perform data augmentation, Mel-spectrogram transformation, and develop a deep residual architecture-based model for prediction. Experimental results show that our system outperforms the baseline, with the ROC-AUC result increased by 5.47%. Finally, we perform an interpretation analysis based on the visualization of the activation map to further validate the model.