Multi-Scale Convolutional Neural Network Ensemble for Multi-Class Arrhythmia Classification

The automated analysis of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals plays a crucial role in the early diagnosis and management of cardiac arrhythmias. The diverse etiology of arrhythmia and the subtle variations in the pathological ECG characteristics pose challenges in designing reliable automated methods. Existing methods mostly use single deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) based approaches for arrhythmia classification. Such approaches may not be adequate for effectively representing diverse pathological ECG characteristics. This paper presents a novel way of using an ensemble of multiple DCNN classifiers for effective arrhythmia classification named Deep Multi-Scale Convolutional neural network Ensemble (DMSCE). Specifically, we designed multiple scale-dependent DCNN expert classifiers with different receptive fields to encode the scale-specific pathological ECG characteristics and generate the local predictions. A convolutional gating network is designed to compute the dynamic fusion weights for the experts based on their competencies. These weights are used to aggregate the local predictions and generate final diagnosis decisions. Moreover, a new error function with a correlation penalty is formulated to enable interaction and optimal diversity among experts during the training process. The model is evaluated on the PTBXL-2020 12-lead ECG and the CinC-training2017 single-lead ECG datasets and delivers state-of-the-art performance. Average F1-score of 84.5 $\%$ and 88.3 $\%$ are obtained for the PTBXL-2020 and the CinC-training2017 datasets, respectively. Impressive performance across various cardiac arrhythmias and the elegant generalization ability for different leads make the method suitable for reliable remote or in-hospital arrhythmia monitoring applications.