Enhancing dynamic ECG heartbeat classification with lightweight transformer model

Abstract

Arrhythmia is a common class of Cardiovascular disease which is the cause for over 31% of all death over the world, according to WHOs' report. Automatic detection and classification of arrhythmia, as an effective tool of early warning, has recently been received more and more attention, especially in the applications of wearable devices for data capturing. However, different from traditional application scenarios, wearable electrocardiogram (ECG) devices have some drawbacks, such as being subject to multiple abnormal interferences, thus making accurate ventricular contraction (PVC) and supraventricular premature beat (SPB) detection to be more challenging. The traditional models for heartbeat classification suffer from the problem of large-scale parameters and the performance in dynamic ECG heartbeat classification is not satisfactory. In this paper, we propose a novel light model Lightweight Fussing Transformer to address these problems. We developed a more lightweight structure named LightConv Attention (LCA) to replace the self-attention of Fussing Transformer. LCA has reached remarkable performance level equal to or higher than self-attention with fewer parameters. In particular, we designed a stronger embedding structure (Convolutional Neural Network with attention mechanism) to enhance the weight of features of internal morphology of the heartbeat. Furthermore, we have implemented the proposed methods on real datasets and experimental results have demonstrated outstanding accuracy of detecting PVC and SPB.

Keywords: Arrhythmia detection; Attention; Deep learning; ECG classification; Transformer.