Automated Heartbeat Classification for Arrhythmia Patients Using a Deep Convolutional Neural Network

The electrocardiogram (ECG) is widely used for diagnosing heart diseases, including arrhythmia, due to its noninvasive nature and simplicity. Accurate detection and classification of arrhythmic types are crucial in preventing heart disease and reducing mortality. To enhance ECG heartbeat classification, we propose an automated system based on a fine-tuned deep convolutional neural network consisting of 13 residual blocks with 28 layers in total. This model was trained using a dataset of 103247 single-lead ECG recordings. Our deep convolutional neural network achieved remarkable results by validating the independent test dataset from the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database. It demonstrated an Accuracy of 99%, a Macro avg Precision of 96%, a Macro avg Recall of 93%, a Weighted avg of 99%, and an impressive Macro avg F1-score of 94%. Notably, our approach has demonstrated superior performance to the original architecture, with a 3% increase in F1-score. These findings showcase the potential of our improved deep learning approach to effectively classify a wide range of arrhythmias from single-lead ECGs, yielding high diagnostic performance comparable to that of cardiologists.