An Apparatus for the Simulation of Breathing Disorders: Physically Meaningful Generation of Surrogate Data
This work addresses the data scarcity issue for AI in healthcare by providing a simple method to generate surrogate breathing disorder waveforms, which is incremental as it builds on existing simulation techniques.
The researchers tackled the problem of generating physically meaningful surrogate data for breathing disorders like COPD by introducing an apparatus using PVC tubes and 3D printed parts to simulate obstructive and restrictive respiratory waveforms in healthy subjects, resulting in waveforms that replicate key characteristics such as FEV1/FVC ratios and changes in inspiratory duty cycle.
The rapidly increasing prevalence of debilitating breathing disorders, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), calls for a meaningful integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into healthcare. While this promises improved detection and monitoring of breathing disorders, AI techniques are almost invariably "data hungry" which highlights the importance of generating physically meaningful surrogate data. Indeed, domain aware surrogates would enable both an improved understanding of respiratory waveform changes with different breathing disorders, and enhance the training of machine learning algorithms. To this end, we introduce an apparatus comprising of PVC tubes and 3D printed parts as a simple yet effective method of simulating both obstructive and restrictive respiratory waveforms in healthy subjects. Independent control over both inspiratory and expiratory resistances allows for the simulation of obstructive breathing disorders through the whole spectrum of FEV1/FVC spirometry ratios (used to classify COPD), ranging from healthy values to values seen in severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Moreover, waveform characteristics of breathing disorders, such as a change in inspiratory duty cycle or peak flow are also observed in the waveforms resulting from use of the artificial breathing disorder simulation apparatus. Overall, the proposed apparatus provides us with a simple, effective and physically meaningful way to generate faithful surrogate breathing disorder waveforms, a prerequisite for the use of artificial intelligence in respiratory health.