Spectro-Temporal Feature Based Multi-Channel Convolutional Neural Network for ECG Beat Classification

Automatic classification of abnormal beats in ECG signals is crucial for monitoring cardiac conditions and the performance of the classification will improve the success rate of the treatment. However, under certain circumstances, traditional classifiers cannot be adapted well to the variation of ECG morphologies or variation of different patients due to fixed hand-crafted features selection. Additionally, existing deep learning related solutions reach their limitation because they fail to use the beat-to-beat information together with single-beat morphologies. This paper applies a novel solution which converts one-dimensional ECG signal into spectro-temporal images and use multiple dense convolutional neural network to capture both beat-to-beat and single-beat information for analysis. The results of simulation on the MIT-BIH arrhythmias database demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology by showing an outstanding detection performance compared to other existing methods.