Could your Child's cough help diagnose asthma or pneumonia?

Copied word for word from the study's registry entry, so the wording is the study team's rather than ours.

Inclusion Criteria: Children aged 28 days to 18 years, regardless of sex, will be eligible for inclusion. The disease group will include children presenting to the outpatient department, emergency department, or inpatient wards of Shanghai Children's Medical Center with cough, wheezing, fever with respiratory symptoms, nasal congestion, rhinorrhea, sore throat, or other respiratory complaints. Participants should be able to complete the symptom questionnaire, cough sound recording, and breath sound recording, and their guardians must provide informed consent and allow review of relevant medical history and diagnostic information. The healthy control group will include children recruited from routine health examinations or children without respiratory complaints, with no acute respiratory symptoms within the past 4 weeks, no known history of chronic respiratory diseases, no obvious respiratory abnormalities on health assessment or research team review, the ability to complete relevant data collection, and guardian informed consent. Exclusion Criteria: Participants will be excluded if they have severe cardiopulmonary malformations, long-term tracheostomy or mechanical ventilation, severe neuromuscular disorders, severe immunodeficiency, or other conditions that may substantially alter cough sound characteristics or affect the clinical presentation of respiratory diseases. Children whose primary diagnosis at the current visit is a non-respiratory disease and who are not suitable for this study will also be excluded. Participants who are unable to complete the symptom questionnaire, or whose cough sound or breath sound recordings remain of insufficient quality after repeated attempts, will not be included or will be excluded from the corresponding modality-specific analysis. Participants with only one unavailable modality may be included in analyses based on the completed modalities but will be excluded from analyses requiring the missing modality. Healthy controls will be excluded from the main control analysis if recent respiratory symptoms, a history of chronic respiratory disease, or other conditions that may affect acoustic features are identified.