An intelligent diagnosis method for cardiovascular diseases based on the CNN-CBAM-GRU model

Zheng Gong1,2,3,4, Yufeng Chen1,2,3,4, Shirong Lin1,2,3,4

  • 1Shengli Clinical Medical College of Fujian Medical University, Fujian Medical University, Fuzhou, Fujian, China.

Plos One
|September 2, 2025
PubMed

Insights

This study introduces a novel CNN-CBAM-GRU model for accurate electrocardiogram (ECG) classification, improving cardiovascular disease (CVD) diagnosis. The model demonstrates high performance on public datasets, offering an efficient solution for automated health monitoring.

Area of Science:

  • Biomedical Engineering
  • Artificial Intelligence in Medicine
  • Cardiology

Background:

  • Early diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) is critical for patient outcomes.
  • Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal classification is challenging due to complex signal characteristics.
  • Automated CVD diagnosis requires robust and efficient ECG analysis methods.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To develop and evaluate a novel deep learning model for enhanced ECG signal classification.
  • To improve the accuracy and efficiency of automated cardiovascular disease diagnosis using ECG data.
  • To provide a comprehensive performance evaluation of the proposed model on public ECG datasets.

Main Methods:

  • Proposed a hybrid deep learning model integrating Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM), and Gated Recurrent Units (GRU).
  • Evaluated the CNN-CBAM-GRU model on two benchmark ECG datasets: MIT-BIH and PTB-XL.
  • Conducted a comprehensive performance assessment using accuracy, precision, recall, sensitivity, and F1-score for five-class classification.

Main Results:

  • The proposed CNN-CBAM-GRU model achieved high classification performance on both datasets.
  • Achieved 98.17% accuracy and 98.91% F1-score on the MIT-BIH dataset.
  • Achieved 99.21% accuracy and 99.47% F1-score on the PTB-XL dataset, with 2.45 million parameters.

Conclusions:

  • The CNN-CBAM-GRU model offers a practical and robust solution for intelligent ECG classification.
  • The model demonstrates a strong balance between predictive performance and computational efficiency.
  • This approach facilitates automated cardiovascular disease diagnosis through advanced ECG analysis.

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