Dual Attention Convolutional Neural Network Based on Adaptive Parametric ReLU for Denoising ECG Signals with Strong Noise

Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal is one of the most important methods for diagnosing cardiovascular diseases but is usually affected by noises. Denoising is therefore necessary before further analysis. Deep learning-related methods have been applied to image processing and other domains with great success but are rarely used for denoising ECG signals. This paper proposes an effective and simple model of encoder-decoder structure for denoising ECG signals (APR-CNN). Specifically, Adaptive Parametric ReLU (APReLU) and Dual Attention Module (DAM) are introduced in the model. Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) is replaced with the APReLU for better negative information retainment. The DAM is an attention-based module consisting of a channel attention module and spatial attention module, through which the inter-spatial and inter-channel relationship of the input data are exploited. We tested our model on the MIT-BIH dataset, and the results show that the APR-CNN can handle ECG signals with a different signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The comparative experiment proves our model is better than other deep learning and traditional methods.Clinical Relevance— This paper proposed a method capable of denoising ECG signals with strong noise to alleviate difficulties for further medical analysis.