Arrhythmia detection in inter-patient ECG signals using entropy rate features and RR intervals with CNN architecture

The classification of inter-patient ECG data for arrhythmia detection using electrocardiogram (ECG) signals presents a significant challenge. Despite the recent surge in deep learning approaches, there remains a noticeable gap in the performance of inter-patient ECG classification. In this study, we introduce an innovative approach for ECG classification in arrhythmia detection by employing a 1D convolutional neural network (CNN) to leverage both morphological and temporal characteristics of cardiac cycles. Through the utilization of 1D-CNN layers, we automatically capture the morphological attributes of ECG data, allowing us to represent the shape of the ECG waveform around the R peaks. Additionally, we incorporate four RR interval features to provide temporal context, and we explore the potential application of entropy rate as a feature extraction technique for ECG signal classification. Consequently, the classification layers benefit from the combination of both temporal and learned features, leading to the achievement of the final arrhythmia classification. We validate our approach using the MIT-BIH arrhythmia dataset, employing both intra-patient and inter-patient paradigms for model training and testing. The model's generalization ability is assessed by evaluating it on the INCART dataset. The model attains average accuracy rates of 99.13% and 99.17% for 2-fold and 5-fold cross-validation, respectively, in intra-patient classification with five classes. In inter-patient classification with three and five classes, the model achieves average accuracies of 98.73% and 97.91%, respectively. For the INCART dataset, the model achieves an average accuracy of 98.20% for three classes. The experimental outcomes demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model compared to state-of-the-art models in recognizing arrhythmias. Thus, the proposed model exhibits enhanced generalization and the potential to serve as an effective solution for recognizing arrhythmias in real-world datasets characterized by class imbalances in practical applications.