Single-Lead to Multi-Lead Electrocardiogram Reconstruction Using a Modified Attention U-Net Framework

With Cardiovascular Diseases on the rise around the world, Electrocardiograms (ECGs) play a crucial role in their diagnosis owing to their non-invasive nature and simplicity. Medical professionals typically use 12-lead ECGs for medical analysis but gathering 12-lead ECG data is an arduous task outside clinical setting. Modern wearables can collect an ECG with fewer leads than the standard 12 leads. However, medical professionals and conventional ECG analysis software find this reduced lead set data challenging to interpret. By using the reduced lead set data to create standard 12-lead ECG data, ECG reconstruction can solve this issue. This paper proposes a novel single-lead to multi-lead ECG reconstruction solution using a modified Attention U-net framework. Using only the lead II of ECG, our model is able to reproduce the other 11 leads of conventional 12-lead ECG with a Pearson correlation, Mean square error and R-squared value of 0.805, 0.0122 and 0.639, respectively. Further, a single combined model is used to reconstruct all 11 leads simultaneously, improving performance and simultaneously reducing the computational resources needed for training compared to current literature in the field. In comparison to previous works, which only reconstruct small ECG segments, our model is trained to reconstruct longer 10-second ECG signals. We demonstrate our model's ability for real-life utilisation using a cardiovascular disease classification task. A deep learning model was trained for multi-disease classification on actual 12-lead ECG data and was tested on both original and reconstructed 12-lead ECG signals. The classification accuracies for the original and reconstructed signals were comparable, portraying that our reconstruction model can preserve diagnostically relevant artefacts in its reconstructed signals. This work provides a new promising solution in the field of single-lead ECG reconstruction, taking us a step closer to bridging the divide between reduced lead set data and existing 12-lead ECG end users like clinicians and automatic ECG classifiers.