Atrial fibrillation detection using deep features and convolutional networks

Atrial fibrillation is a cardiac arrhythmia that affects an estimated 33.5 million people globally and is the potential cause of 1 in 3 strokes in people over the age of 60. Detection and diagnosis of atrial fibrillation (AFIB) is done non-invasively in the clinical environment through the evaluation of electrocardiograms (ECGs). Early research into automated methods for the detection of AFIB in ECG signals focused on traditional biomedical signal analysis to extract important features for use in statistical classification models. Artificial intelligence models have more recently been used that employ convolutional and/or recurrent network architectures. In this work, significant time and frequency domain characteristics of the ECG signal are extracted by applying the short-Time Fourier transform and then visually representing the information in a spectrogram. Two different classification approaches were investigated that utilized deep features in the spectrograms constructed from ECG segments. The first approach used a pre-Trained DenseNet model to extract features that were then classified using Support Vector Machines, and the second approach used the spectrograms as direct input into a convolutional network. Both approaches were evaluated against the MIT-BIH AFIB dataset, where the convolutional network approach achieved a classification accuracy of 93.16%. While these results do not surpass established automated atrial fibrillation detection methods, they are promising and warrant further investigation given they did not require any noise pre-filtering, hand-crafted features, nor a reliance on beat detection.