MFB-LANN: A lightweight and updatable myocardial infarction diagnosis system based on convolutional neural networks...

12 leads electrocardiogram (ECG) are widely used to diagnose myocardial infarction (MI). Generally, the symptoms of MI can be reflected by waveforms in the heartbeat, and the contribution of different ECG leads to different types of MI is different. Therefore, it is significant to use the heartbeat waveform features and the lead relationship features for multi-category MI diagnosis. Moreover, the challenge of individual differences and lightweight algorithms also need to be further resolved and explored in the ECG automatic diagnosis system.

This paper presents a lightweight MI diagnosis system named multi-feature-branch lead attention neural network (MFB-LANN) via 12 leads ECG signals. It is designed based on the characteristics of the ECG lead. Specifically, 12 independent feature branches correspond to different leads, and each branch contains different convolutional layers to extract features in the heartbeat, then a novel attention module is developed named lead attention mechanism (LAM) to assign different weights to each feature branch. Finally all the weighted feature branches are fused for classification. Furthermore, to overcome individual differences, patient-specific scheme and active learning (AL) are used to train and update the model iteratively.

Experimental results based on Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) database shows that the MFB-LANN achieved satisfactory results with accuracy of 99.63% based on 5-fold cross validation under the intra-patient scheme. The patient-specific experiment yielded an average accuracy of 96.99% compared to the state-of-the-art. By contrast, the model achieved acceptable results on the hybrid database (PTB and PTB-XL), especially achieving 94.19% accuracy after the update. Moreover, the system can complete the update process and real-time diagnosis on the ARM Cortex-A72 platform.

Experiments show that the proposed method for MI diagnosis has more obvious advantages compared to other recent methods, and it has great potential to be applied to the mobile medical field.