Efficient ECG Beat Classification Using Inception Network on Software and FPGA Platforms

In this paper, we present a new system for the classification of electrocardiogram (ECG) beats by using a fast least square support vector machine (LSSVM). Five feature extraction methods are comparatively examined in the 15-dimensional feature space. The dimension of the each feature set is reduced by using dynamic programming based on divergence analysis. After the preprocessing of ECG data, six types of ECG beats obtained from the MIT-BIH database are classified with an accuracy of 95.2% by the proposed fast LSSVM algorithm together with discrete cosine transform. Experimental results show that not only the fast LSSVM is faster than the standard LSSVM algorithm, but also it gives better classification performance than the standard backpropagation multilayer perceptron network.

ECG beat classification using particle swarm optimization and radial basis function neural network

An automated patient-specific ECG beat classification using LSTM-based recurrent neural networks

The electrocardiogram (ECG) is an important tool for exploring the structure and function of the heart due to its low cost, ease of use, efficiency, and non-invasive nature. With the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) in the medical field, ECG beat classification has emerged as a key area of research for performing accurate, automated, and interpretable cardiac analysis. According to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses criteria, we examined a total of 106 relevant articles published between 2014 and 2024. This study investigates ECG signal analysis to identify and categorize various beats with better accuracy and efficiency, by emphasizing and applying vital pre-processing techniques for denoising the raw data. Particular attention is given to the evolution from traditional feature-engineering methods toward advanced architectures with automated feature extraction and classification, such as convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks, and hybrid frameworks with attention mechanisms. In addition, this review article investigates the common challenges observed in the existing studies, including data imbalance, inter-patient variability, and the absence of unified evaluation metrics, which restrict fair comparison and clinical translation. To address these gaps, future research directions are proposed, focusing on the development of standardized multi-center datasets, cross-modal fusion of physiological signals, and interpretable AI models to facilitate real-world deployment in healthcare systems. This systematic review provides a structured overview of the current state and emerging trends in ECG beat classification, offering clear insights for researchers and clinicians to guide future advancements in intelligent cardiac diagnostics.

An accurate electrocardiogram (ECG) beat classification can benefit the diagnosis of the cardiovascular disease. Deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) can automatically extract valid features from data, which is an effective way for the classification of the ECG beats. However, the fully-connected layer in CNNs requires a fixed input dimension, which limits the CNNs to receive fixed-scale inputs. Signals of different scales are generally processed into the same size by segmentation and downsampling. If information loss occurs during a uniformly-sized process, the classification accuracy will ultimately be affected. To solve this problem, this paper constructs a new CNN framework spatial pyramid pooling (SPP) method, which solves the deficiency caused by the size of input data. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology-Biotechnology (MIT-BIH) arrhythmia database is employed as the training and testing data for the classification of heartbeat signals into six categories. Compared with the traditional method, which may lose a large amount of important information and easy to be over-fitted, the robustness of the proposed method can be guaranteed by extracting data features from different sizes. Experimental results show that the proposed architecture network can extract more high-quality features and exhibits higher classification accuracy (94%) than the traditional deep CNNs (90.4%).

The electrocardiogram (ECG) is a non-invasive tool used to diagnose various heart conditions. Arrhythmia is one of the primary causes of cardiac arrest. Early ECG beat classification plays a significant role in diagnosing life-threatening cardiac arrhythmias. However, the ECG signal is very small, the anti-interference potential is low, and the noise is easily influenced. Thus, clinicians face challenges in diagnosing arrhythmias. Thus, a method to automatically identify and distinguish arrhythmias from the ECG signal is invaluable. In this paper, a hybrid approach based on marine predators algorithm (MPA) and convolutional neural network (CNN) called MPA-CNN is proposed to classify the non-ectopic, ventricular ectopic, supraventricular ectopic, and fusion ECG types of arrhythmia. The proposed approach is a combination of heavy feature extraction and classification techniques; hence, outperforms other existing classification approaches. Optimal characteristics were derived directly from the raw signal to decrease the time required for and complexity of the computation. Precision levels of 99.31%, 99.76%, and 99.47% were achieved by the proposed approach on the MIT-BIH,EDB, and INCART databases, respectively.

The occlusion in one of the coronary arteries of the heart leads to the cardiac ailment, myocardial infarction (MI). The localization of MI based on the investigation of the morphology of the multi-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) is the initial task for the diagnosis of this ailment. In this paper, the multiscale convolutional neural network is proposed for the automated localization of MI ailment from multi-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) beats. The Fourier-Bessel (FB) series expansion based empirical wavelet transform (EWT) with fixed order ranges is introduced for the multiscale analysis of multi-lead ECG beat. The FB spectrum of each lead ECG beat is segregated into contiguous segments using the fixed order ranges. Furthermore, the order ranges from these contiguous segments are used to design an empirical wavelet filter bank for the extraction of subband signals from each lead ECG beat. The convolutional neural network (CNN) is used for the classification of various categories of MI as anterior MI (AMI), anterio-lateral MI (ALMI), anterio-septal MI (ASMI), inferior MI (IMI), inferio-lateral MI (ILMI), inferio-posterio-lateral MI (IPLMI) and normal sinus rhythm (NSR). The experimental results reveal that the lower-order range subband signal coupled with CNN attains higher average accuracy values of 99.92%, 99.34%, 99.95%, 99.95%, 99.91%, and 99.86% respectively, for AMI, ALMI, ASMI, IMI, ILMI, and IPLMI classes. The subband signal of multi-lead ECG beats with order range of [1-26] is highly affected during various categories of MI heart disease, and this band signal has higher performance as compared to the existing MI localization approaches.

This study proposes a hybrid Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KANs) and convolutional neural networks (CNN) to classify electrocardiogram (ECG) signal abnormalities in one lead ECG data of wearable telemedicine. The hybrid model combines CNN to extract hierarchical features from sequential data and KANs to model non-linear relationships with fewer parameters as an efficient classification. The study explores the model’s capacity to balance accuracy, computational efficiency, and memory usage as critical factors for real-time health monitoring in resource-constrained environments on the single-lead MIT-Beth Israel hospital (MIT-BIH) Supraventricular Arrhythmia database with five different class labels. For comparison, standalone CNN and KAN models were also trained on the same balanced dataset. The CNN model achieved an accuracy of 96.62%, precision of 96.81%, and recall of 96.53%. The KAN model, while computationally efficient, performed less effectively, with an accuracy of 94.15%, precision of 95.01%, and recall of 92.57%. In contrast, our hybrid KAN-CNN model outperformed both, attaining an accuracy of 97.53%, precision of 97.66%, recall of 97.40%, and a low loss of 0.0840. The study also explores the impact of quantization and compression on model performance, revealing that both CNN and Hybrid KAN-CNN models retained high accuracy post-quantization, whereas the KAN model exhibited a more significant drop in performance.

Computer aided diagnosis systems can help to reduce the high mortality rate among cardiac patients. Automatical classification of electrocardiogram (ECG) beats plays an important role in such systems, but this issue is challenging because of the complexities of ECG signals. In literature, feature designing has been broadly-studied. However, such methodology is inevitably limited by the heuristics of hand-crafting process and the challenge of signals themselves. To address it, we treat the problem of ECG beat classification from the metric and measurement perspective. We propose a novel approach, named “Set-Based Discriminative Measure”, which first learns a discriminative metric space to ensure that intra-class distances are smaller than inter-class distances for ECG features in a global way, and then measures a new set-based dissimilarity in such learned space to cope with the local variation of samples. Experimental results have demonstrated the advantage of this approach in terms of effectiveness, robustness, and flexibility based on ECG beats from the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database.

In this paper, an electrocardiogram (ECG) beat classification system based on wavelet transformation and probabilistic neural network (PNN) is proposed to discriminate six ECG beat types. The effects of two wavelet decomposition structures, the two-stage two-band and the two-stage full binary decomposition structures, in the recognition of ECG beat types are studied. The ECG beat signals are first decomposed into components in different subbands using discrete wavelet transformation. Three statistical features of each decomposed subband signals as well as the AC power and instantaneous RR interval of the original signal are exploited to characterize the ECG signals. A PNN then follows to classify the feature vectors. The result shows that features extracted from the decomposed signals based on the two-stage two-band structure outperform the two-stage full binary structure. A promising accuracy of 99.65%, with equally well recognition rates of over 99% throughout all type of ECG beats, has been achieved using the optimal feature set. Only 11 features are needed to attain this performance. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method for the computer-aided diagnosis of heart diseases based on ECG signals

Abstract: Mixture of experts (ME) is a modular neural network architecture for supervised learning. This paper illustrates the use of the ME network structure to guide model selection for classification of electrocardiogram (ECG) beats. The expectation maximization algorithm is used for training the ME so that the learning process is decoupled in a manner that fits well with the modular structure. The ECG signals were decomposed into time–frequency representations using discrete wavelet transforms and statistical features were calculated to depict their distribution. The ME network structure was implemented for ECG beats classification using the statistical features as inputs. To improve classification accuracy, the outputs of expert networks were combined by a gating network simultaneously trained in order to stochastically select the expert that is performing the best at solving the problem. Five types of ECG beats (normal beat, congestive heart failure beat, ventricular tachyarrhythmia beat, atrial fibrillation beat, partial epilepsy beat) obtained from the Physiobank database were classified with an accuracy of 96.89% by the ME network structure. The ME network structure achieved accuracy rates which were higher than those of the stand‐alone neural network models.

Millions of clinicians rely daily on automated preliminary electrocardiogram (ECG) interpretation. Critical comparisons of machine learning-based automated analysis against clinically accepted standards of care are lacking. To use readily available 12-lead ECG data to train and apply an explainability technique to a convolutional neural network (CNN) that achieves high performance against clinical standards of care. This cross-sectional study was conducted using data from January 1, 2003, to December 31, 2018. Data were obtained in a commonly available 12-lead ECG format from a single-center tertiary care institution. All patients aged 18 years or older who received ECGs at the University of California, San Francisco, were included, yielding a total of 365 009 patients. Data were analyzed from January 1, 2019, to March 2, 2021. A CNN was trained to predict the presence of 38 diagnostic classes in 5 categories from 12-lead ECG data. A CNN explainability technique called LIME (Linear Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations) was used to visualize ECG segments contributing to CNN diagnoses. Area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), sensitivity, and specificity were calculated for the CNN in the holdout test data set against cardiologist clinical diagnoses. For a second validation, 3 electrophysiologists provided consensus committee diagnoses against which the CNN, cardiologist clinical diagnosis, and MUSE (GE Healthcare) automated analysis performance was compared using the F1 score; AUC, sensitivity, and specificity were also calculated for the CNN against the consensus committee. A total of 992 748 ECGs from 365 009 adult patients (mean [SD] age, 56.2 [17.6] years; 183 600 women [50.3%]; and 175 277 White patients [48.0%]) were included in the analysis. In 91 440 test data set ECGs, the CNN demonstrated an AUC of at least 0.960 for 32 of 38 classes (84.2%). Against the consensus committee diagnoses, the CNN had higher frequency-weighted mean F1 scores than both cardiologists and MUSE in all 5 categories (CNN frequency-weighted F1 score for rhythm, 0.812; conduction, 0.729; chamber diagnosis, 0.598; infarct, 0.674; and other diagnosis, 0.875). For 32 of 38 classes (84.2%), the CNN had AUCs of at least 0.910 and demonstrated comparable F1 scores and higher sensitivity than cardiologists, except for atrial fibrillation (CNN F1 score, 0.847 vs cardiologist F1 score, 0.881), junctional rhythm (0.526 vs 0.727), premature ventricular complex (0.786 vs 0.800), and Wolff-Parkinson-White (0.800 vs 0.842). Compared with MUSE, the CNN had higher F1 scores for all classes except supraventricular tachycardia (CNN F1 score, 0.696 vs MUSE F1 score, 0.714). The LIME technique highlighted physiologically relevant ECG segments. The results of this cross-sectional study suggest that readily available ECG data can be used to train a CNN algorithm to achieve comparable performance to clinical cardiologists and exceed the performance of MUSE automated analysis for most diagnoses, with some exceptions. The LIME explainability technique applied to CNNs highlights physiologically relevant ECG segments that contribute to the CNN's diagnoses.

Time adaptive ECG driven cardiovascular disease detector

Multi-stream Bi-GRU network to extract a comprehensive feature set for ECG signal classification

The study intended to explore the effect of different neural network algorithms in the electrocardiogram (ECG) classification of patients with congenital heart disease (CHD). Based on the single convolutional neural network (CNN) ECG algorithm and the recurrent neural network (RNN) ECG algorithm, a multimodal neural network (MNN) ECG algorithm was constructed utilizing the MIT-BIH database as training set and test set. Furthermore, the MNN ECG algorithm was optimized to establish an improved MNN (IMNN) algorithm, which was applied to the diagnosis of CHD patients. The CHD patients admitted between August 2016 and August 2019 were selected for analysis to compare the classification effect and accuracy rate of IMNN, MNN, CNN ECG, and RNN ECG algorithms. It was found that the RNN ECG algorithm had higher classification sensitivity and true positive rate in terms of normal or bundle (NB) branch block beat, supraventricular abnormal (SA) rhythm, abnormal ventricular (AV) beat, and fusion beat (FB) than the CNN ECG algorithm ( P < 0.05 ), and the classification sensitivity and true positive rate of IMNN algorithm in the four aspects were significantly higher than those of MNN algorithm ( P < 0.05 ). The classification accuracy of CNN ECG algorithm and RNN ECG algorithm was above 98%, while that of MNN algorithm and IMNN algorithm was better than that of CNN ECG algorithm and RNN ECG algorithm, and the accuracy rate can reach 98.5% or more. Moreover, the accuracy rate of the IMNN algorithm can reach more than 98%. In conclusion, IMNN not only has a good classification ability in the simulated environment but also performs well in the actual environment, which is worthy of clinical promotion.