Lightweight Deep Learning Architecture for Multi-Lead ECG Arrhythmia Detection

Cardiovascular diseases are known as major contributors to death globally. Accurate identification and classification of cardiac arrhythmias from electrocardiogram (ECG) signals is essential for early diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular diseases. This research introduces an innovative deep learning architecture that integrates Convolutional Neural Networks with a channel attention mechanism, enhancing the model's capacity to concentrate on essential aspects of the ECG signals. Unlike most prior studies that depend on single-lead data or complex hybrid models, this work presents a novel yet simple deep learning architecture to classify five arrhythmia classes that effectively utilizes both 2-lead and 12-lead ECG signals, providing more accurate representations of clinical scenarios. The model's performance was evaluated on the MIT-BIH and INCART arrhythmia datasets, achieving accuracies of 99.18% and 99.48%, respectively, along with F1 scores of 99.18% and 99.48%. These high-performance metrics demonstrate the model's ability to differentiate between normal and arrhythmic signals, as well as accurately identify various arrhythmia types. The proposed architecture ensures high accuracy without excessive complexity, making it well-suited for real-time and clinical applications. This approach could improve the efficiency of healthcare systems and contribute to better patient outcomes.