AI and the World's Hard Problems · Medicine & drug discovery · Nature (computational biology) · 2026-10-16
Identification of adventitious lung sounds in children with respiratory illnesses in Bangladesh using artificial intelligence and digital auscultation
Integrated management of childhood illness guidelines have high sensitivity but low specificity for pneumonia. Health workers in Bangladesh recorded lung sounds from children under five with suspected pneumonia using a digital stethoscope, and an AI algorithm was compared with a pediatrician panel. The AI detected abnormal sounds with 61.8% sensitivity and 60.7% specificity overall, and 63.5% and 66.8% in pneumonia cases under IMCI. The authors describe this as moderate performance, with improvement needed in classifying uninterpretable recordings.