The automatic detection of atrial fibrillation (AF) is crucial for its association with the risk of embolic stroke. Most of the existing AF detection methods usually convert 1D time-series electrocardiogram (ECG) signal into 2D spectrogram to train a complex AF detection system, which results in heavy training computation and high implementation cost. This paper proposes an AF detection method based on an end-to-end 1D convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture to raise the detection accuracy and reduce network complexity. By investigating the impact of major components of a convolutional block on detection accuracy and using grid search to obtain optimal hyperparameters of the CNN, we develop a simple, yet effective 1D CNN. Since the dataset provided by PhysioNet Challenge 2017 contains ECG recordings with different lengths, we also propose a length normalization algorithm to generate equal-length records to meet the requirement of CNN. Experimental results and analysis indicate that our method of 1D CNN achieves an average F1 score of 78.2%, which has better detection accuracy with lower network complexity, as compared with the existing deep learning-based methods.
Keywords: atrial fibrillation (AF); convolutional neural network (CNN); deep learning; electrocardiogram (ECG).