Beat-to-Beat Electrocardiogram Waveform Classification Based on a Stacked Convolutional and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory

Abstract

Delineating the electrocardiogram (ECG) waveform is an important step with high significance in cardiology diagnosis. It refers to extract the ECG morphology in start, peak, end points of waveform. Due to various shapes and abnormalities presented in ECG signals, several conventional computer algorithms always fail to extract the essential feature of heart information. Thus, it is critical to investigate an automated ECG signal delineation with its result accuracy. In this study, we propose the delineation process by using bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) classifier. Such process was conducted as one beat to the next (beat-to-beat), that means the ECG waveform classification is start of P-wave1 to start of P-wave2. However, such classifier lack of feature extraction process, reducing the classification accuracy result. To improve the classifier performance, convolutional layers as facture extraction are stacked with BiLSTM named ConvBiLSTM. We conducted the experimental based on seven-class ECG waveform using a publicly available QT Database with annotation of the main waveforms to produce high accurate classifier, i.e., Pstart–Pend, Pend – QRSstart, QRSstart – Rpeak, Rpeak – QRSend, QRSend – Tstart, Tstart–Tend, and Tend–Pstart. It was found that the proposed model showed remarkable results with overall average performances of 99.83% accuracy, 98.82% sensitivity, 99.90% specificity, 98.86% precision, and 98.84% F1 score. Based on these promising results, the efficacy of the proposed stacked ConvBiLSTM model in classifying ECG waveform provides a great opportunity to help cardiologists in diagnosis decision-making for faster assessment.

Keywords

• ECG delineation
• stacked convolutional layers
• bidirectional LSTM
• waveform classification