Classification of Premature Ventricular Contraction Using Deep Learning

Electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis has been used to identify different heart problems and deep learning is emerging as a common tool to analyse ECGs. Premature ventricular contraction (PVC) is the most common cause of abnormal heartbeats; in most cases this is harmless but under specific conditions, it can lead to a life-threatening cardiac disease. Automated PVC detection in this scenario is a task of significant importance for relieving the heavy workloads of experts in the manual analysis of long-term ECGs. To identify PVCs, this research aims to use the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database to classify QRS complexes using five different deep neural networks: Long Short Term Memory, AlexNet, GoogleNet, Inception V3 and ResNet-50. The results showed high efficiency and reliability in the final diagnoses during two separate experiments (one with the entire dataset and the other with a balanced dataset). The ResNet-50 was the first experiment's best classifier (accuracy = 99.8%, F1-score = 99.2%), and the second experiment's best classifier was Inception V3 (accuracy = 98.8%, F1-score=98.8%). Relevant information, in this research, was extrapolated from a study of the confusion matrix to conduct a "failure analysis" to understand where and why the classifiers made incorrect classifications.