ECG Heart-Beat Classification Using Multimodal Image Fusion

In this paper, we present a novel Image Fusion Model (IFM) for ECG heart-beat classification to overcome the weaknesses of existing machine learning techniques that rely either on manual feature extraction or direct utilization of 1D raw ECG signal. At the input of IFM, we first convert the heart-beats of ECG into three different images using Gramian Angular Field (GAF), Recurrence Plot (RP) and Markov Transition Field (MTF) and then fuse these images to create a single imaging modality. We use AlexNet for feature ex-traction and classification and thus employ end-to-end deep learning. We perform experiments on PhysioNet’s MIT-BIH dataset for five different arrhythmias in accordance with the AAMI EC57 standard and on PTB diagnostics dataset for myocardial infarction (MI) classification. We achieved an state-of-an-art results in terms of prediction accuracy, precision and recall.