Ventricular ectopic beat detection using a wavelet transform and a convolutional neural network.

Objective: Ventricular contractions in healthy individuals normally follow the contractions of atria to facilitate more efficient pump action and cardiac output. With a ventricular ectopic beat (VEB), volume within the ventricles are pumped to the body's vessels before receiving blood from atria, thus causing inefficient blood circulation. VEBs tend to cause perturbations in the instantaneous heart rate time series, making the analysis of heart rate variability inappropriate around such events, or requiring special treatment (such as signal averaging). Moreover, VEB frequency can be indicative of life-threatening problems. However, VEBs can often mimic artifacts both in morphology and timing. Identification of VEBs is therefore an important unsolved problem. The aim of this study is to introduce a method of wavelet transform in combination with deep learning network for the classification of VEBs. Approach: We proposed a method to automatically discriminate VEB beats from other beats and artifacts with the use of wavelet transform of the electrocardiogram (ECG) and a convolutional neural network (CNN). Three types of wavelets (Morlet wavelet, Paul wavelet and Gaussian derivative) were used to transform segments of single-channel (1D) ECG waveforms to two-dimensional (2D) time-frequency 'images'. The 2D time-frequency images were then passed into a CNN to optimize the convolutional filters and classification. Ten-fold cross validation was used to evaluate the approach on the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database (MIT-BIH). The American Heart Association (AHA) database was then used as an independent dataset to evaluate the trained network. Main results: Ten-fold cross validation results on MIT-BIH showed that the proposed algorithm with Paul wavelet achieved an overall F1 score of 84.94% and accuracy of 97.96% on out of sample validation. Independent test on AHA resulted in an F1 score of 84.96% and accuracy of 97.36%. Significance: The trained network possessed exceptional transferability across databases and generalization to unseen data.