Inter-patient ECG arrhythmia heartbeat classification network based on multiscale convolution and FCBA.

Cardiac arrhythmias that can lead to sudden cardiac death are common. Electrocardiograms (ECGs) offer valuable information about cardiac status and play a crucial role in evaluating patients with arrhythmia in clinical diagnosis. The development of machine learning technologies has made the computer-aided diagnosis of cardiac arrhythmias possible, which can improve the efficiency and quality of medical treatment. In this study, a new method for the automatic classification of heartbeats is developed. This paper presents a novel approach to detect arrhythmias in the inter-patient paradigm using a convolutional neural network (CNN) that integrates multiscale convolutional blocks, frequency convolutional block attention (FCBA) modules, and RR interval features. The proposed method also includes oversampling for the heartbeats of the minority class and the addition of random noise to increase training samples and alleviate the problem of data imbalance. We used the MIT-BIH-AR arrhythmia database , which is a globally recognized ECG database, to evaluate the classification performance of the proposed model in this paper. Based on the experiments, the sensitivities of the normal beats (N), supraventricular ectopic beats (SVEB), and ventricular ectopic beats (VEB) were 96.9%, 89.3%, and 93.3%, respectively. In the inter-patient heartbeat classification paradigm, the overall accuracy of the proposed method is 95.60% in classifying heartbeats. The study shows that the proposed scheme outperforms other published schemes in terms of classification results. • A heartbeat classification method combining deep neural networks and medical features is proposed. • The use of multiscale convolutional fusion allows the network to extract richer electrocardiogram (ECG) features. • A frequency convolutional block attention (FCBA) module is proposed to adjust the wight relationships. • Medical features, namely RR intervals, are embedded into our deep model to further improve the performance of heartbeat classification. • Accuracy of 95.6% was achieved under inter-patient scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]