Respiratory acoustic thoracic imaging (RATHI): assessing deterministic interpolation techniques.

As respiratory sounds contain mechanical and clinical pulmonary information, technical efforts have been devoted during the past decades to analysing, processing and visualising them. The aim of this work was to evaluate deterministic interpolating functions to generate surface respiratory acoustic thoracic images (RATHIs), based on multiple acoustic sensors. Lung sounds were acquired from healthy subjects through a 5 x 5 microphone array on the anterior and posterior thoracic surfaces. The performance of five interpolating functions, including the linear, cubic spline, Hermite, Lagrange and nearest neighbour method, were evaluated to produce images of lung sound intensity during both breathing phases, at low (approximately 0.5ls(-1)) and high (approximately 1.0ls(-1)) airflows. Performance indexes included the normalised residual variance nrv (i.e. inaccuracy), the prediction covariance cv (i.e. precision), the residual covariance rcv (i.e. bias) and the maximum squared residual error semax (i.e. tolerance). Among the tested interpolating functions and in all experimental conditions, the Hermite function (nrv=0.146 +/- 0.059, cv= 0.925 +/- 0.030, rcv = -0.073 +/- 0.068, semax = 0.005 +/- 0.004) globally provided the indexes closest to the optimum, whereas the nearest neighbour (nrv=0.339 +/- 0.023, cv = 0.870 +/- 0.033, rcv= 0.298 +/- 0.032, semax = 0.007 +/- 0.005) and the Lagrange methods (nrv = 0.287 +/- 0.148, cv = 0.880 +/- 0.039, rcv = -0.524 +/- 0.135, semax = 0.007 +/- 0.0001) presented the poorest statistical measurements. It is concluded that, although deterministic interpolation functions indicate different performances among tested techniques, the Hermite interpolation function presents a more confident deterministic interpolation for depicting surface-type RATHI.