ADCGNet: Attention-based dual channel Gabor network towards efficient detection and classification of electrocardiogram images

Heart disease is a major health issue, and accurate diagnosis of irregular heartbeats and heart failure is crucial. Current diagnostic processes can be time-consuming, requiring significant effort from clinicians. An effective classifier, ADCGNet: Attention-based Dual Channel Gabor Network is proposed to address this challenge by accurately classifying anomalies. ADCGNet involves pre-processing every ECG beat into two-dimensional images using Analytical Morlet transform and then applying thirty-two Gabor filters and Sobel edge detection to enhance features. ADCGNet comprises three blocks, with the first block using dual channels to extract essential features in the images efficiently. The second block includes a multi-head attention mechanism to focus on relevant features, and the third block uses a SoftMax activation function to perform classification tasks. Extensive experiments with public datasets from PhysioNet, and comparison with several state-of-the-art classifiers indicate ADCGNet is superior. Specifically, ADCGNet achieved an accuracy of 99.17%, 98.98% in precision, a recall of 98.87%, an F1-score of 98.82% and AUC, 98.75% with optimal hyperparameters. Further, a GRAD-CAM visualization of activated areas on the test samples gives graphical insight into the performance of ADCGNet. The proposed ADCGNet classifier has promising potential for enhancing the diagnosis of heart disease, and we believe it will be of much interest to the medical community.