A paper presented at EMBC 2025

We are pleased to announce that our paper "Assessing the Utility of Audio Foundation Models for Heart and Respiratory Sound Analysis" by Daisuke Niizumi, Daiki Takeuchi, Masahiro Yasuda, Binh Thien Nguyen, Yasunori Ohishi, and Noboru Harada has been accepted to EMBC 2025.

This paper investigates the practical effectiveness of off-the-shelf audio foundation models by comparing their performance across four respiratory and heart sound tasks with SOTA fine-tuning results. Experiments show that models struggled on two tasks with noisy data but achieved SOTA performance on the other tasks with clean data. Moreover, general-purpose audio models outperformed a respiratory sound model, highlighting their broader applicability. With gained insights and the released code, we contribute to future research on developing and leveraging foundation models for respiratory and heart sounds.