Cardiovascular Disease Classification System With ECG-Gating PCG Algorithm and Programmable AI Accelerator Design

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are among the leading causes of mortality. Traditional diagnostic methods require hospital visits and professional medical personnel, but the timely detection of cardiac conditions can significantly improve survival rates. Therefore, wearable devices with edge-computing capabilities for real-time cardiovascular diagnosis are highly important. Heart sounds provide valuable information on valve closure; however, variations in heart rhythm or heart valve diseases (HVDs) can complicate the identification of affected valves and the interpretation of heart sound origins. Additionally, different disease classifications require distinct model architectures, posing significant challenges for implementation on wearable devices. This study addresses these challenges through three key contributions: an ECG-gating PCG algorithm, improved classification algorithms for arrhythmia and valvular heart disease, and a systolic array-based accelerator with an application-specific instruction-set processor (ASIP) capable of performing inference on multiple models. The algorithms achieve 97.8% and 99.3% accuracy on the MIT-BIH and heart murmur databases, respectively, with hardware quantization errors below 0.5%. The accelerator is fabricated in TSMC 180 nm CMOS technology, achieving an operating power of 414 µW at 1 MHz. The execution times for arrhythmia and valvular heart disease classification are 7.2 ms and 21 ms, respectively, and the energy efficiency normalized to 40 nm is 395.3 GOPS/W. These show that this system can effectively solve the classification of arrhythmia and heart valve diseases.