language: en tags: - audio - audio-classification - respiratory-sounds - healthcare - medical - hear - vit - lora - pytorch license: apache-2.0 datasets: - SPRSound metrics: - accuracy - f1 - roc_auc base_model: google/hear-pytorch pipeline_tag: audio-classification
HeAR-SPRSound: Respiratory Sound Abnormality Classifier
Model Summary
A fine-tuned respiratory sound classifier built on top of Google's HeAR (Health Acoustic Representations) foundation model. The model performs binary classification β distinguishing normal from abnormal respiratory sounds β and is trained on the SPRSound dataset spanning BioCAS challenge years 2022β2025.
The architecture combines the HeAR ViT backbone (fine-tuned with LoRA) with a Gated Attention Pooling layer that intelligently aggregates variable-length audio sequences chunk by chunk, followed by a two-layer MLP classifier.
Architecture
Audio Input (16 kHz WAV)
β
HeAR Preprocessing (2-second chunks, log-mel spectrograms [1 Γ 192 Γ 128])
β
HeAR ViT Encoder (google/hear-pytorch)
ββ LoRA adapters on Q & V projections in last 6 transformer blocks
β
Per-chunk CLS Embeddings [B Γ T Γ 512]
β
Gated Attention Pooling (length-masked softmax attention over chunks)
β
Pooled Representation [B Γ 512]
β
MLP Classifier (512 β 256 β 2, GELU, Dropout 0.4)
β
Normal / Abnormal
Key components:
- Backbone:
google/hear-pytorch(frozen except LoRA layers + LayerNorms) - LoRA: rank=16, alpha=16, dropout=0.3, applied to Q+V projections in last 6 blocks
- Pooling: Gated Attention Pool (dual-path tanh Γ sigmoid gating, hidden dim 512)
- Loss: Focal Loss (Ξ³=2.0) with class-balanced sample weighting
- Inference: Per-class threshold optimization (one-vs-rest F1 on validation set)
Training Details
| Hyperparameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Base model | google/hear-pytorch |
| Input sample rate | 16,000 Hz |
| Chunk size | 2 seconds (32,000 samples) |
| Max audio duration | 10 seconds (up to 5 chunks) |
| Optimizer | AdamW |
| Learning rate | 5e-5 |
| Weight decay | 0.2 |
| Warmup epochs | 10 |
| Max epochs | 100 |
| Batch size | 96 |
| Early stopping patience | 20 epochs |
Dataset
SPRSound β multi-year BioCAS challenge respiratory auscultation dataset.
| Year | Split |
|---|---|
| BioCAS 2022 | Train + Inter/Intra test |
| BioCAS 2023 | Test |
| BioCAS 2024 | Test |
| BioCAS 2025 | Test |
All data was re-split at the patient level (70% train / 15% val / 15% test) to prevent data leakage. No patient appears in more than one split. Labels were consolidated to a binary scheme:
- normal: all event annotations are "Normal"
- abnormal: any non-normal respiratory event present (wheeze, crackle, rhonchus, etc.)
Class imbalance was addressed through WeightedRandomSampler and Focal Loss.
Data Augmentation
A custom PhoneLikeAugment pipeline was applied during training (p=0.5) to simulate real-world acoustic variability:
- Random gain (β18 to +8 dB)
- Phone band-limiting (HP: 120β200 Hz, LP: 4β8 kHz)
- Fast echo / room simulation (10β80 ms delay taps)
- Colored noise addition (SNR 3β25 dB)
- Soft AGC / tanh compression
- Random time shift (Β±80 ms)
- Rare clipping (p=0.15)
Usage
import torch
import torchaudio
from transformers import AutoModel
# Load model
model = AdaptiveRespiratoryModel(
num_classes=2,
dropout=0.4,
use_lora=True,
lora_r=16,
lora_alpha=16,
lora_dropout=0.3,
lora_last_n_blocks=6
)
checkpoint = torch.load("best_model.pth", map_location="cpu", weights_only=False)
model.load_state_dict(checkpoint["model"], strict=False)
model.eval()
# Audio must be 16 kHz, processed through HeAR's preprocess_audio
# into chunks of shape [T, 1, 192, 128]
β οΈ Requires
google/hear-pytorchand the HEAR library for audio preprocessing.
Limitations & Intended Use
- Intended use: Research and prototyping in respiratory sound analysis. Not validated for clinical use.
- The model was trained on auscultation recordings from SPRSound; performance may degrade on recordings from different stethoscope types, microphones, or patient populations.
- Binary classification only β does not distinguish between specific pathology types (e.g., wheeze vs. crackle).
- Threshold calibration was performed on the validation set; recalibration is recommended when deploying to new domains.
Citation
If you use this model, please cite the SPRSound dataset and the HeAR foundation model:
@misc{sprsound,
title = {SPRSound: Open-Source SJTU Paediatric Respiratory Sound Database},
year = {2022},
note = {BioCAS 2022β2025 challenge dataset}
}
@misc{hear2024,
title = {HeAR: Health Acoustic Representations},
author = {Google Health},
year = {2024},
url = {https://github.com/Google-Health/hear}
}
License
This model is released under the Apache 2.0 license. The HeAR backbone model is subject to Google's original license terms. SPRSound data is subject to its own terms β please refer to the dataset authors.