Recurrent neural network architecture based classification of atrial fibrillation using single lead ecg

Abstract

Conventionally, Atrial Fibrillation (AF) has been detected using atrial analyses which is vulnerable to background noise. Again there is a dependency on statistical features which are extracted from R-R intervals of long ECG recordings. The present disclosure addresses AF detection from single lead short ECG recordings of less than one minute wherein automatic detection of P-R and P-Q intervals is difficult, which introduces error in feature computing from the segregated intervals and compromises the performance of the classifier. In the present disclosure, a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based architecture comprising two Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks is provided for temporal analysis of R-R intervals and P wave regions in an ECG signal respectively. Output sates of the two LSTM networks are merged at a dense layer along with a set of hand-crafted statistical features to create a composite feature set for classification of the AF.