Automatic Detection of Atrial Fibrillation Based on CNN-LSTM and Shortcut Connection

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is one of the most common persistent arrhythmias, which has a close connection to a large number of cardiovascular diseases. However, if spotted early, the diagnosis of AF can improve the effectiveness of clinical treatment and effectively prevent serious complications. In this paper, a combination of an 8-layer convolutional neural network (CNN) with a shortcut connection and 1-layer long short-term memory (LSTM), named 8CSL, was proposed for the Electrocardiogram (ECG) classification task. Compared with recurrent neural networks (RNN) and multi-scale convolution neural networks (MCNN), not only can 8CSL extract features skillfully, but also deal with long-term dependency between data. In particular, 8CSL includes eight shortcut connections that can improve the speed of the data transmission and processing as a result of the shortcut connections. The model was evaluated on the base of the test set of the Computing in Cardiology Challenge 2017 dataset with the F1 score. The ECG recordings were cropped or padded to the same length. After 10-fold cross-validation, the average test F1 score was 84.89%, 89.55%, and 85.64% when the segment length was 5, 10, 20 seconds, respectively. The experiment results demonstrate excellent performance with potential practical applications.