[2603.00355] StethoLM: Audio Language Model for Cardiopulmonary Analysis Across Clinical Tasks

Computer Science > Machine Learning arXiv:2603.00355 (cs) [Submitted on 27 Feb 2026] Title:StethoLM: Audio Language Model for Cardiopulmonary Analysis Across Clinical Tasks Authors:Yishan Wang, Tsai-Ning Wang, Mathias Funk, Aaqib Saeed View a PDF of the paper titled StethoLM: Audio Language Model for Cardiopulmonary Analysis Across Clinical Tasks, by Yishan Wang and 3 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Listening to heart and lung sounds - auscultation - is one of the first and most fundamental steps in a clinical examination. Despite being fast and non-invasive, it demands years of experience to interpret subtle audio cues. Recent deep learning methods have made progress in automating cardiopulmonary sound analysis, yet most are restricted to simple classification and offer little clinical interpretability or decision support. We present StethoLM, the first audio-language model specialized for cardiopulmonary auscultation, capable of performing instruction-driven clinical tasks across the full spectrum of auscultation analysis. StethoLM integrates audio encoding with a medical language model backbone and is trained on StethoBench, a comprehensive benchmark comprising 77,027 instruction-response pairs synthesized from 16,125 labeled cardiopulmonary recordings spanning seven clinical task categories: binary classification, detection, reporting, reasoning, differential diagnosis, comparison, and location-based analysis. Through multi-stage training that combi...