Automated Recognition of Arrhythmia Using Deep Neural Networks for 12-Lead Electrocardiograms with Fractional Time–Frequency Domain Extension

Arrhythmia is a group of conditions in which the heartbeat is irregular. There are many types of arrhythmia. Some can be life-threatening. Electrocardiogram (ECG) is an effective clinical tool used to diagnosis arrhythmia. Automatic recognition of different arrhythmia types in ECG signals has become an important and challenging issue. In this article, we proposed an algorithm to detect arrhythmia in 12-lead ECG signals and classify signals into 9 categories. Two 19-layer deep neural networks combining convolutional neural network and gated recurrent unit were proposed to realize this work. The first one was trained directly with the raw 12-lead ECG data while the other one was trained with an 18-"lead" ECG data, where the six extra leads containing morphology information in fractional time–frequency domain were generated utilizing fractional Fourier transform (FRFT). Overall detection results were obtained by fusing the output of these two networks and the final classification results on the testing dataset reports our proposed algorithm obtained a F1 score of 0.855. Furthermore, with our proposed algorithm, a better F1 score 0.81 was attained using training dataset provided by the China Physiological Signal Challenge held in 2018.