A practical system based on CNN-BLSTM network for accurate classification of ECG heartbeats of MIT-BIH imbalanced dataset

ECG beats have a key role in the reduction of fatality rate arising from cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) by using Arrhythmia diagnosis computer-aided systems and get the important information from patient cardiac conditions to the specialist. However, the accuracy and speed of arrhythmia diagnosis are challenging in ECG classification systems, and the existence of noise, instability nature, and imbalance in heartbeats challenged these systems. Accurate and on-time diagnosis of CVDs is a vital and important factor. So it has a significant effect on the treatment and recovery of patients. In this study, with the aim of accurate diagnosis of CVDs types, according to arrhythmia in ECG heartbeats, we implement an automatic ECG heartbeats classification by using discrete wavelet transformation on db2 mother wavelet and SMOTE oversampling algorithm as pre-processing level, and a classifier that consists of Convolutional neural network and BLSTM network. Then evaluate the proposed system on MIT-BIH imbalanced dataset, according to AAMI standards. The evaluations results show this approach with 50 epoch training achieved 99.78% accuracy for category F, 98.85% accuracy for category N, 99.43% accuracy for category S, 99.49% accuracy for category V, 99.87% accuracy for category Q. The source code is available at https://gitlab.com/arminshoughi/cnnlstmecg-classification. Our proposed classification system can be used as a tool for the automatic diagnosis of arrhythmia for CVDs specialists with the aim of primary screening of patients with heart arrhythmia.