A transformer-based deep neural network for arrhythmia detection using continuous ECG signals

Recently, much effort has been put into solving arrhythmia classification problems with machine learning-based methods. However, inter-heartbeat dependencies have been ignored by many researchers which possess the potential to boost arrhythmia classification performance. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel transformer-based deep learning neural network, ECG DETR, which performs arrhythmia detection on continuous single-lead ECG segments. The proposed model simultaneously predicts the positions and categories of all the heartbeats within an ECG segment. Therefore, the proposed method is a more compact end-to-end arrhythmia detection algorithm compared with beat-by-beat classification methods as explicit heartbeat segmentation is not required. The performance and generalizability of our proposed scheme are verified on the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database and MIT-BIH atrial fibrillation database. Experiments are carried out on three different arrhythmia detection tasks including 8, 4, and 2 distinct labels respectively using 10-fold cross-validation. According to the results, the suggested method yields comparable performance in contrast with previous works considering both heartbeat segmentation and classification, which achieved an overall accuracy of 99.12%, 99.49%, and 99.23% on the three aforementioned tasks.