<![CDATA[Respiratory diseases such as asthma, pneumonia, and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) remain major global health challenges, particularly in resource-limited settings where access to pulmonary specialists and early diagnostic tools is limited. Automatic lung sound classifications have emerged as a promising non-invasive screening approach; however, existing methods often rely on single-scale feature extraction, conventional loss functions, and offline analysis, which limit their discriminative capability and real-time applicability. The aim of this study is to develop and evaluate a deep learning framework for real-time multi-class lung sound classifications that improves discriminative representation and temporal sensitivity. To address limitations, this study proposes MK-TripNet, a novel deep learning architecture designed to integrate multi-scale feature extraction, discriminative embedding learning, and real-time inference within a unified framework. The main contribution of this work is the unified integration of a Multi-Kernel convolutional architecture, Triplet Loss-based embedding learning, and Sliding Window segmentation within a single end-to-end framework, enabling accurate segment-level lung sound classifications in real-time scenarios. Unlike prior approaches, the proposed method simultaneously captures fine-grained temporal patterns and broader spectral characteristics while explicitly maximizing inter-class separability in the embedding space. The proposed model was evaluated using a newly constructed dataset comprising 1,409 lung sound segments obtained from primary digital stethoscope recordings and publicly available respiratory sound databases. Experimental results demonstrate that MK-TripNet consistently outperforms several strong baseline models, including CNN-BiGRU, CNN-BiGRU-UMAP, and VGGish-Triplet, achieving an accuracy of 89.1%, an F1-score of 0.89, and a recall of 0.88. Ablation studies further confirm that the combined use of Multi-Kernel convolution, Triplet Loss, and Sliding Window segmentation yields the most robust and generalizable performances. These findings highlight the clinical potential of MK-TripNet for real-time digital auscultation and point-of-care respiratory screening, particularly in resource-limited and telemedicine settings.]]>
Copyrights © 2026
