RespFocus: Learning Temporal Evidence for Weakly Supervised Respiratory Sound Classification

Yi Tian, Xiaohuan Chen, Yufei tang, Xinyu Lin, Hongliang Li +3

Respiratory auscultation provides a low-cost means of assessing pulmonary function, yet transient crackles and sustained wheezes can be difficult to recognize in noisy clinical recordings. Conventional deep learning classifiers often operate as black boxes, offering limited insight into the temporal acoustic evidence supporting their predictions. We present RespFocus, a weakly supervised framework that uses multiple instance learning (MIL) to learn inspectable temporal evidence from cycle-level labels and integrate it into classification. We also introduce PedResp2026, a multicenter pediatric respiratory sound cohort collected in routine clinical environments with adjudicated cycle-level annotations. In classification experiments, RespFocus achieves four-class Scores of 69.55\% on public ICBHI 2017 and 72.91\% on PedResp2026. Evidence diagnostics and matched temporal interventions support the functional contribution of the learned evidence to model predictions. Together, these findings highlight RespFocus's potential as a tool for automated respiratory sound diagnosis.