Sep 23, 2026, cs.SDJ/K move · Enter open · S save
Nicholas Rasmussen, Oleg Zaslavsky, Zih-Ling Wang, Hongyu Yu+4
Biobehavioral Nursing & Health Informatics, School of Nursing, University of Washington, 1959 NE Pacific St, Seattle, WA, USA. · School of Nursing, University of Washington, 1959 NE Pacific St, Seattle, WA, USA. · Electrical Engineering, University of Washington Bothell, 17827 113th Ave NE, Bothell, WA, USA.+2
Pneumonia is difficult to diagnose in older long-term care residents; multimorbidity and atypical presentations obscure signs, motivating operationally efficient objective testing. We analyzed multi-channel digital stethoscope recordings from 185 Japanese residents (73 pneumonia, 112 symptomatic without), using radiologist-confirmed chest X-rays and clinician diagnoses as supervisory signals that train convolutional neural networks, multimodal fusion, and channel-based variants with time-domain Grad-CAM interpretability. Models were evaluated with repeated patient-level cross-validation showing models with X-ray supervision outperformed clinician supervision (F1 0.729, accuracy 0.783 vs. F1 0.637, accuracy 0.711). Additionally, a three-channel selection protocol maintained performance (F1 0.736; accuracy 0.803), with two mid-thoracic sites ranking highest and Grad-CAM attention overlapping adventitious sounds. These findings indicate automated multi-channel lung-sound analysis can aid long-term care pneumonia diagnosis, with X-ray supervision being more reliable than clinical, and fewer channels preserving performance while lowering acquisition times.