Abstract
BACKGROUND: Infectious diseases, particularly COVID-19, continue to be a significant global health issue. Although many countries have reduced or stopped large-scale testing measures, the detection of such diseases remains a propriety. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to develop a novel, lightweight deep neural network for efficient, accurate, and cost-effective detection of COVID-19 using a nasal breathing audio data collected via smartphones. METHODOLOGY: Nasal breathing audio from 128 patients diagnosed with the Omicron variant was collected. Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients, a widely used feature in speech and sound analysis, were employed for extracting important characteristics from the audio signals. Additional feature selection was performed using random forest (RF) and principal component analysis (PCA) for dimensionality reduction. A Dense-ReLU-Dropout model was trained with K-fold cross-validation (K = 3), and performance metrics like accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score were used to evaluate the model. RESULTS: The proposed model achieved 97% accuracy in detecting COVID-19 from nasal breathing sounds, outperforming state-of-the-art methods such as those by Lella and Alphonse and Abayomi-Alli et al. Our Dense-ReLU-Dropout model, using RF and PCA for feature selection, achieves high accuracy with greater computational efficiency compared to existing methods that require more complex models or larger datasets. CONCLUSION: The findings suggest that the proposed method holds significant potential for clinical implementation, advancing smartphone-based diagnostics in infectious diseases. The Dense-ReLU-Dropout model, combined with innovative feature processing techniques, offers a promising approach for efficient and accurate COVID-19 detection, showcasing the capabilities of mobile device-based diagnostics.