Affiliations: [a] Department of Information Management, Yuan Ze University, Taoyuan, Taiwan | [b] School of Software, Nanchang University, Jiangxi, China | [c] Department of Cardiology, Taoyuan Armed Forces General Hospital, Taoyuan, Taiwan | [d] Department of Cardiology, Taipei Veterans General Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author: Jui-Chien Hsieh, Ph.D. Lab of Medical Informatics and Telemedicine, Department of Information Management, Yuan Ze University, 135 Yuan Tung Road, Taoyuan 320, Taiwan. E-mails: [email protected] or [email protected].
Abstract: BACKGROUND: Because clinically used 12-lead electrocardiography (ECG) devices have high falsepositive errors in automatic interpretations of atrial fibrillation (AF), they require substantial improvements before use. OBJECTIVE: A clinical 12-lead ECG pre-processing method with a parallel convolutional neural network (CNN) model for 12-lead ECG automatic AF recognition is introduced. METHODS: Raw AF diagnosis data from a 12-lead ECG device were collected and analyzed by two cardiologists to differentiate between true- and false-positives. Using a stationary wavelet transform (SWT) and independent component analysis (ICA) noise reduction was conducted and baseline wandering was corrected for the raw signals. AF patterns were learned and predicted using a parallel CNN deep learning (DL) model. (1) The proposed method alleviates the decreased ECG QRS amplitude enhances the signal-to-noise ratio and clearly shows atrial and ventricular activities. (2) After training, the CNNbased AF detector significantly reduced false-positive errors. The precision of AF diagnosis increased from 77.3% to 94.0 ± 1.5% as compared to ECG device interpretation. For AF screening, the model showed an average sensitivity of 96.8 ± 2.2%, specificity of 79.0 ± 5.8%, precision of 94.0 ± 1.5%, F1-measure of 95.2 ± 1.0%, and overall accuracy of 92.7 ± 1.5%. CONCLUSIONS: The method can bridge the gap between the research and clinical practice The ECG signal pre-processing and DL-based AF interpretation can be rapidly implemented clinically.
