Patient-level validation of a foundation-model pipeline for pediatric lung sounds: physician-annotated adventitious events are recognized, disease groups are not reliably predicted

arXiv:2603.15688v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Background: Lung-sound classifiers are usually evaluated on recording- or event-level splits, although each child contributes many recordings. We evaluated a foundation-model pipeline (PulmoVec) with the patient as the unit of partitioning and asked whether disease group can be predicted beyond age and sex. Methods: We analyzed 19693 physician-annotated respiratory events from 736 children in the public SPRSound database. A frozen Health Acoustic Representations (HeAR) encoder with low-rank adapters was trained for screening (normal versus adventitious), sound pattern (normal, crackles, wheeze/rhonchi) and disease group (pneumonia, bronchial disease, normal/other); event probabilities were stacked with age, sex and auscultation site. The primary analysis was nested patient-grouped cross-validation; comparators were the majority class, annotated event duration and demographics. Results: The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) was 0.95 (95% CI 0.94 to 0.96) for both screening and sound pattern, against 0.78 and 0.75 for event duration alone; the positive predictive value for adventitious events was 0.72. Disease-group prediction reached an AUC of 0.58 (95% CI 0.54 to 0.62), and its accuracy was below the majority-class rate at event level (0.44 versus 0.62) and at patient level (0.46 versus 0.60). Conclusions: Recognition of physician-annotated adventitious events holds under patient-level validation and is not explained by event duration or demographics, although its positive predictive value would limit unaided use. Prediction of disease group, a clinical diagnosis, from lung-sound events alone was not demonstrated. Lung-sound studies should partition data by patient and report non-acoustic comparators.

Abstract:Background: Lung-sound classifiers are usually evaluated on recording- or event-level splits, although each child contributes many recordings. We evaluated a foundation-model pipeline (PulmoVec) with the patient as the unit of partitioning and asked whether disease group can be predicted beyond age and sex. Methods: We analyzed 19693 physician-annotated respiratory events from 736 children in the public SPRSound database. A frozen Health Acoustic Representations (HeAR) encoder with low-rank adapters was trained for screening (normal versus adventitious), sound pattern (normal, crackles, wheeze/rhonchi) and disease group (pneumonia, bronchial disease, normal/other); event probabilities were stacked with age, sex and auscultation site. The primary analysis was nested patient-grouped cross-validation; comparators were the majority class, annotated event duration and demographics. Results: The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) was 0.95 (95% CI 0.94 to 0.96) for both screening and sound pattern, against 0.78 and 0.75 for event duration alone; the positive predictive value for adventitious events was 0.72. Disease-group prediction reached an AUC of 0.58 (95% CI 0.54 to 0.62), and its accuracy was below the majority-class rate at event level (0.44 versus 0.62) and at patient level (0.46 versus 0.60). Conclusions: Recognition of physician-annotated adventitious events holds under patient-level validation and is not explained by event duration or demographics, although its positive predictive value would limit unaided use. Prediction of disease group, a clinical diagnosis, from lung-sound events alone was not demonstrated. Lung-sound studies should partition data by patient and report non-acoustic comparators.

v2 is substantially revised with a patient-level re-analysis (n=736) to correct v1's event-level data leakage. Acoustic event classification holds (AUC 0.95), but disease-group prediction is unsupported (AUC 0.58), superseding v1 conclusions. 17 pages, 4 figs, 3 tables; 32-page supplement appended

Sound (cs.SD); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2603.15688 [cs.SD]

(or arXiv:2603.15688v2 [cs.SD] for this version)

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Patient-level validation of a foundation-model pipeline for pediatric lung sounds: physician-annotated adventitious events are recognized, disease groups are not reliably predicted

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