Nothing has seemingly been proven for sure.
Research is ongoing but some sources suggest there are links between the fibrosis, the immune system and allergies. Whilst the disease has no known cause, hence the name Idiopathic, it is commonly found in Westies, suggesting that it may have a genetic background and therefore could be reduced with careful and better breeding. There are several sites on the internet providing very detailed scientific information but this link below we found to be a good general over-view:Īnother very good site has been developed by Professor Cécile Clercx (small animal internal medicine) and her team at the University of Liège in Belgium and they are highly concerned with Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis. She is the coordinator of a European project to better understand this disease they have several veterinary partners in the UK also (Dr Sheena Warman from Bristol University is the local coordinator). Their website can be found by pointing your browser at: It is as if the author felt the need to flag it up, but didn’t want to draw attention to it. In the one book it is mentioned, it is given a short paragraph but merely mentions it in passing, focusing more on the above issues. They only mention the standard complaints that most dogs suffer from. In all but one book, the disease is completely ignored. We possess countless books on Westies, some very general books but most are detailed insights into the breed covering all aspects of bringing up your puppy, feeding it, training, grooming, common ailments etc. In so doing the heart has to work harder, to get the oxygen around the body putting extra strain on the heart & lungs. What this means is that the lungs have to work harder and harder to take in oxygen that the body desperately needs, compared to healthy lungs. Our experimental results show significant performance improvements of 9.84% (absolute) in F-score on the target domain using the multi-input CNN model and transfer learning for crackle detection.Clinical relevance- Crackle detection in lung sounds, multi-input convolutional neural networks, transfer learning.Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis otherwise known as Westie Lung Disease, to put in simple terms, is a disease which slowly over a period of 12 – 18 months increasingly prevents the lungs from functioning as they should, restricting their movement and therefore their ability to absorb oxygen into the body. The multi-input model is then fine-tuned on the target domain of our self-collected lung sound database for classifying crackles and normal lung sounds. The pre-trained network is used to build a multi-input CNN model, which shares the same network architecture for respiratory cycles and their corresponding respiratory phases. We use log-mel spectrogram features of respiratory cycles of lung sounds. In particular, a single input convolutional neural network (CNN) model is pre-trained on a source domain using ICBHI 2017, the largest publicly available database of lung sounds. This allows us to transfer knowledge from one dataset to another dataset for crackle detection in lung sounds. In this paper, we use transfer learning to tackle the mismatch of the recording setup. However, it might be a challenge to develop a well-performing algorithm for small non-public data, which have only a few subjects and show differences in recording devices and setup. Large annotated lung sound databases are publicly available and might be used to train algorithms for diagnosis systems.