Inter-patient ECG classification using deep convolutional neural networks

In this paper we present fully automatic interpatient electrocardiogram (ECG) signal classification method using deep convolutional neural networks (CNN). ECG is simple and non-invasive way to measure the electric activity of the heart and it provides valuable information about the condition of the heart. It is widely utilized for detecting different abnormalities in heartbeat. Identifying and classification abnormalities is timeconsuming, because it often requires analyzing each heartbeat of the ECG recording. Therefore, automatic classification of the arrhythmias using machine-learning technologies can bring various benefits. In this paper, we are focusing on inter-patient arrhythmia classification, where separate patient data is used in training and test phase. This method is more realistic in clinical environment, where trained model needs to operate with patients, whose ECG data was not available during the training phase. Our proposed method gives 92% sensitivity, 97% positive predictivity and 23% false positive rate for normal heartbeats. For supraventricular ectopic beat, our approach gives 62% sensitivity, 56% positive predictivity and 2% false positive rate. For ventricular ectopic beat, our method gives 89% sensitivity, 51% positive predictivity and 6% false positive rate. These results from our fully automatic feature learning approach are on par with solutions that require manual feature engineering.