12-lead ECG signal processing and atrial fibrillation prediction in clinical practice

Because clinically used 12-lead electrocardiography (ECG) devices have high falsepositive errors in automatic interpretations of atrial fibrillation (AF), they require substantial improvements before use.

A clinical 12-lead ECG pre-processing method with a parallel convolutional neural network (CNN) model for 12-lead ECG automatic AF recognition is introduced.

Raw AF diagnosis data from a 12-lead ECG device were collected and analyzed by two cardiologists to differentiate between true- and false-positives. Using a stationary wavelet transform (SWT) and independent component analysis (ICA) noise reduction was conducted and baseline wandering was corrected for the raw signals. AF patterns were learned and predicted using a parallel CNN deep learning (DL) model. (1) The proposed method alleviates the decreased ECG QRS amplitude enhances the signal-to-noise ratio and clearly shows atrial and ventricular activities. (2) After training, the CNNbased AF detector significantly reduced false-positive errors. The precision of AF diagnosis increased from 77.3% to 94.0 ± 1.5% as compared to ECG device interpretation. For AF screening, the model showed an average sensitivity of 96.8 ± 2.2%, specificity of 79.0 ± 5.8%, precision of 94.0 ± 1.5%, F1-measure of 95.2 ± 1.0%, and overall accuracy of 92.7 ± 1.5%.

The method can bridge the gap between the research and clinical practice The ECG signal pre-processing and DL-based AF interpretation can be rapidly implemented clinically.