Exploring Novel Biomarkers for Emphysema Detection

This is a cross sectional, single center study. At the clinic, patients with COPD will be invited to perform several voice related tasks (paced reading, sustained vowels, cough, quiet breathing) and will be instructed to perform capnometry measurements. These measurements will be performed before and after a light exercise task (5-STS: 5-sit-to-stand test). Clinical characterisation of patients including pulmonary function tests (spirometry, body plethysmography, diffusion capacity) and CT scans have been performed in all patients as a part of routine workup in the COPD care pathway. Emphysema will be quantified as low attenuation areas with a density below -950 Hounsfield units (HU) using Syngovia (Siemens, Erlangen, Germany). The primary outcome will fit a simple machine learning classification model (e.g. using logistic regression, support vector machines, random forests and/or decision tree) to classify logistic regression model for the outcome of emphysema (\>25% vs ≤ 25%) from speech features and capnometry. with explanatory variables of speech features. Similar classification methods with incremental models using capnography features will be explored. Prior to carrying out the above analyses, data has to be pre-processed, including merging data, quality control, handling of missing data and feature extraction.