# Analyzing the impact of SARS-CoV-2 variants on respiratory sound signals

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.12309 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12309/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 3 of its 17 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Coswara -- A Database of Breathing, Cough, and Voice Sounds for COVID-19 Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10548/) (2020)
- [DiCOVA Challenge: Dataset, task, and baseline system for COVID-19 diagnosis using acoustics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09148/) (2021)
- [Towards sound based testing of COVID-19 -- Summary of the first Diagnostics of COVID-19 using Acoustics (DiCOVA) Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10997/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Coswara: A respiratory sounds and symptoms dataset for remote screening of SARS-CoV-2 infection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12741/) (2023)
- [Voice EHR: Introducing Multimodal Audio Data for Health](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01620/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The COVID-19 outbreak resulted in multiple waves of infections that have been associated with different SARS-CoV-2 variants. Studies have reported differential impact of the variants on respiratory health of patients. We explore whether acoustic signals, collected from COVID-19 subjects, show computationally distinguishable acoustic patterns suggesting a possibility to predict the underlying virus variant. We analyze the Coswara dataset which is collected from three subject pools, namely, i) healthy, ii) COVID-19 subjects recorded during the delta variant dominant period, and iii) data from COVID-19 subjects recorded during the omicron surge. Our findings suggest that multiple sound categories, such as cough, breathing, and speech, indicate significant acoustic feature differences when comparing COVID-19 subjects with omicron and delta variants. The classification areas-under-the-curve are significantly above chance for differentiating subjects infected by omicron from those infected by delta. Using a score fusion from multiple sound categories, we obtained an area-under-the-curve of 89% and 52.4% sensitivity at 95% specificity. Additionally, a hierarchical three class approach was used to classify the acoustic data into healthy and COVID-19 positive, and further COVID-19 subjects into delta and omicron variants providing high level of 3-class classification accuracy. These results suggest new ways for designing sound based COVID-19 diagnosis approaches.