Inter-Patient ECG Heartbeat Classification with Temporal VCG Optimized by PSO

Sci Rep. 2017 Sep 5;7(1):10543. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-09837-3.

Abstract

Classifying arrhythmias can be a tough task for a human being and automating this task is highly desirable. Nevertheless fully automatic arrhythmia classification through Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals is a challenging task when the inter-patient paradigm is considered. For the inter-patient paradigm, classifiers are evaluated on signals of unknown subjects, resembling the real world scenario. In this work, we explore a novel ECG representation based on vectorcardiogram (VCG), called temporal vectorcardiogram (TVCG), along with a complex network for feature extraction. We also fine-tune the SVM classifier and perform feature selection with a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. Results for the inter-patient paradigm show that the proposed method achieves the results comparable to state-of-the-art in MIT-BIH database (53% of Positive predictive (+P) for the Supraventricular ectopic beat (S) class and 87.3% of Sensitivity (Se) for the Ventricular ectopic beat (V) class) that TVCG is a richer representation of the heartbeat and that it could be useful for problems involving the cardiac signal and pattern recognition.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Biological Variation, Population*
  • Data Interpretation, Statistical
  • Heart Rate
  • Humans
  • Sensitivity and Specificity
  • Vectorcardiography / methods*
  • Vectorcardiography / standards