In this paper, a wavelet packet feature selection method for lung sounds based on optimization is proposed to obtain the best feature set which maximizes the differences between normal lung sounds and abnormal lung sounds(sounds with wheezes or rales). The proposed method includes two main steps: Firstly, the wavelet packet transform(WPT) is used to extract the original features of lung sounds; then the genetic algorithm(GA) is used to select the best feature set. The obtained optimal feature set is sent to four different classifiers to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. Experimental results show that the feature set obtained by the proposed method provides a higher classification accuracy of 94.6% in comparison with the best wavelet packet basis approach and multi-scale principal component analysis(PCA) approach. Meanwhile, the proposed method has effective generalization performance and can obtain the best feature set without priori knowledge of lung sounds. In this paper, a wavelet packet feature selection set for maximizing the differences between normal lung sounds and abnormal lung sounds (sounds with wheezes or rales). The proposed method includes two main steps: Firstly, the wavelet packet transform (WPT) is used to extract the original features of lung sounds; then the genetic algorithm (GA) is used to select the best feature set. The obtained optimal feature set is sent to four different classifiers to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. Experimental results show that the feature set obtained by the proposed method provides a higher classification accuracy of 94.6% in comparison with the best wavelet packet basis approach and multi-scale principal component analysis (PCA) approach. , the proposed method has effective generalization performance and can obtain the best feature set without priori knowledge of lung sounds.