Interpatient ECG Heartbeat Classification with an Adversarial Convolutional Neural Network

Discovering shared, invariant feature representations across subjects in electrocardiogram (ECG) classification tasks is crucial for improving the generalization of models to unknown patients. Although deep neural networks have recently been emerging in extracting generalizable ECG features, they usually rely on labeled samples from a large number of subjects to guarantee generalization. Extracting invariant representations to intersubject variabilities from a small number of subjects is still a challenge today due to individual physical differences. To address this problem, we propose an adversarial deep neural network framework for interpatient heartbeat classification by integrating adversarial learning into a convolutional neural network to learn subject-invariant, class-discriminative features. The proposed method was evaluated on the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database which is a publicly available ECG dataset collected from 47 patients. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, the proposed method achieves the highest performance for detecting supraventricular ectopic beats (SVEBs), which are very challenging to identify, and also gains comparable performance on the detection of ventricular ectopic beats (VEBs). The sensitivities of SVEBs and VEBs are 78.8% and 92.5%, respectively. The precisions of SVEBs and VEBs are 90.8% and 94.3%, respectively. With high performance in the detection of pathological classes (i.e., SVEBs and VEBs), this work provides a promising method for ECG classification tasks when the number of patients is limited.