An accurate recording system and its use in breath sounds spectral analysis.

An accurate recording system was set up and used for analyzing normal and asthmatic breath-sound features. Breath sounds are recorded at the trachea simultaneously with the airflow signal at 0.5- and 1-1/s levels. The study was carried out in the frequency domain using a fast-fourier transform (FFT). FFTs are taken on 1,024-sample blocks (one block = 200 ms) over a duration of about 20 s. Different characteristics of the spectra are calculated in the range 60-1,260 Hz for 11 normal and 10 asthmatic subjects. This allows the computation of an index that discriminates (P less than 0.0005) asthma cases from normal cases. Spectral features strongly depend on the flow rate both for normal and asthmatic subjects. Increasing the flow rate raises the high-frequency components of the spectra.