Cough Expired Volume and Cough Peak Flow Rate Estimation Based on GA-BP Method

Cough is a respiratory protective behavior for clearing the secretion. The cough process can be characterized by three features which are cough peak flow rate, peak velocity time, and cough expired volume. The cough expired volume (CEV) and the cough peak flow rate (CPFR) are important for medical diagnosis and cough effectiveness assessment. In this study, the CEV and CPFR values of 700 healthy participants were measured and collected by using a portable pulmonary function device. The gender, age, height, weight, and smoking status information of the 700 participants were also collected. Meanwhile, the integration of backpropagation neural network and genetic algorithm (GA-BP) method was developed to estimate CEV and CPFR values. The results showed that the estimation accuracy of GA-BP method exceeds 90%, which indicates that the GA-BP method could be effectively used for CEV and CPFR value estimation. Furthermore, the method proposed in this paper could be useful for medical diagnosis and medical device development.