Analyzing single-lead short ECG recordings using dense convolutional neural networks and feature-based...

The prevalence of atrial fibrillation (AF) in the general population is 0.5%-1%. As AF is the most common sustained cardiac arrhythmia that is associated with an increased morbidity and mortality, its timely diagnosis is clinically desirable. The main aim of this study as our contribution to the PhysioNet/CinC Challenge 2017 was to develop an automatic algorithm for classification of normal sinus rhythm (NSR), AF, other rhythm (O), and noise using a short single-channel ECG. Furthermore, the impact of changing labels/annotations on performance of the proposed algorithm was studied in this article.

The challenge training dataset (8528 ECG recordings) and a complementary dataset (6312 ECG recordings) from other sources were used for algorithm development. Version 3 (v3), which is an updated version of the annotations at the official phase of the challenge (v2), was used in this study. In the proposed algorithm, densely connected convolutional networks were combined with feature-based post-processing after initial signal quality analysis for the classification of ECG recordings.

The F1 scores for classification of NSR, AF, and O were 0.91, 0.83, and 0.72, respectively, which led to a F1 of 0.82. There was a small or no performance difference between the top entries in the official phase of the challenge and our proposed method. An increase of 2.5% in F1 score was observed when the same annotations for training and test was used (using v3 annotations) compared to using different annotations (v2 annotations for training and v3 annotations for the test).

Our promising results suggest that the availability of more data with improved labeling along with improvement in signal quality analysis make our algorithm suitable for practical clinical applications.