Wheeze is a general sign for obstructive airway diseases whose clinical diagnosis mainly depends on auscultating or X-ray imaging with subjectivity or harm. Therefore, this paper introduces an automatic, noninvasive method to detect wheeze which consists of STFT decomposition, preprocessing of the spectrogram, correlation-coefficients calculating and duration determining. In particular, duration determining takes the Haas effect into account, which facilitates us to achieve a better determination. Simulation result shows that the sensibility (SE), the specificity (SP) and the accuracy (AC) are 88.57%, 97.78% and 93.75%, respectively, which indicates that this method could be an efficient way to detect wheeze.

Dichotomous coordinate descent (DCD) iterations method has been proposed for adaptive feedback cancellation, which uses a fixed number of iterations and a fixed amplitude range. In this paper, improved DCD algorithms are proposed, which substitute the constant number of iterations and the amplitude range with a variable number of iterations(VI) and/or a variable amplitude range(VA). Thus VI-DCD, VA-DCD and VIA-DCD algorithms are obtained. Computer simulations are used to compare the performance of the proposed algorithms against original DCD algorithm, and simulation results demonstrate that significant improvements are achieved in the convergence speed and accuracy. Another notable conclusion by further simulations is that the proposed algorithms achieve superior performance with a real speech segment as the input.