A lightweight deep learning approach for detecting electrocardiographic lead misplacement

Objective. Electrocardiographic (ECG) lead misplacement can result in distorted waveforms and amplitudes, significantly impacting accurate interpretation. Although lead misplacement is a relatively low-probability event, with an incidence ranging from 0.4% to 4%, the large number of ECG records in clinical practice necessitates the development of an effective detection method. This paper aimed to address this gap by presenting a novel lead misplacement detection method based on deep learning models.Approach. We developed two novel lightweight deep learning model for limb and chest lead misplacement detection, respectively. For limb lead misplacement detection, two limb leads and V6 were used as inputs, while for chest lead misplacement detection, six chest leads were used as inputs. Our models were trained and validated using the Chapman database, with an 8:2 train-validation split, and evaluated on the PTB-XL, PTB, and LUDB databases. Additionally, we examined the model interpretability on the LUDB databases. Limb lead misplacement simulations were performed using mathematical transformations, while chest lead misplacement scenarios were simulated by interchanging pairs of leads. The detection performance was assessed using metrics such as accuracy, precision, sensitivity, specificity, and Macro F1-score.Main results. Our experiments simulated three scenarios of limb lead misplacement and nine scenarios of chest lead misplacement. The proposed two models achieved Macro F1-scores ranging from 93.42% to 99.61% on two heterogeneous test sets, demonstrating their effectiveness in accurately detecting lead misplacement across various arrhythmias.Significance. The significance of this study lies in providing a reliable open-source algorithm for lead misplacement detection in ECG recordings. The source code is available athttps://github.com/wjcai/ECG_lead_check.