Listening for Airway Stenosis: A Foundation Model-Based Method for Rapid and Accessible Detection

2026-09-14

AI Summary

研究利用声学AI和患者语音记录快速检测气道狭窄，通过声学基础模型提取相关声学特征，实现高精度筛查。

Abstract

Airway stenosis can cause severe respiratory complications, yet its detection often relies on specialized examinations and medical imaging. This study explores the potential of acoustic AI for rapid and accessible airway stenosis detection using readily acquired patient voice recordings. We systematically investigate whether acoustic foundation models (AFMs) can extract acoustic representations associated with airway stenosis-related speech patterns. Experiments are conducted on a cohort of 748 participants from the Bridge2AI-Voice dataset, 134 with airway stenosis and 614 without. The best-performing model achieves an AUROC of 0.952 and an accuracy of 0.924 (means over five-fold cross-validation), highlighting the potential of AFMs to transfer beyond general-purpose speech applications to clinical diagnostic tasks. Further analysis reveals that the model primarily relies on connected-speech recordings rather than isolated acoustic tasks, such as sustained phonation and breathing. Overall, these results suggest that voice-based acoustic AI could complement existing diagnostic workflows by enabling rapid, low-burden, and widely accessible screening for airway stenosis.

Problem

• airway stenosis
• rapid detection
• accessible detection
• acoustic AI

Innovation

• acoustic foundation models
• airway stenosis detection
• voice-based screening