A Deep Convolutional Neural Network for the Early Detection of Heart Disease

Heart disease is one of the key contributors to human death. Each year, several people die due to this disease. According to the WHO, 17.9 million people die each year due to heart disease. With the various technologies and techniques developed for heart-disease detection, the use of image classification can further improve the results. Image classification is a significant matter of concern in modern times. It is one of the most basic jobs in pattern identification and computer vision, and refers to assigning one or more labels to images. Pattern identification from images has become easier by using machine learning, and deep learning has rendered it more precise than traditional image classification methods. This study aims to use a deep-learning approach using image classification for heart-disease detection. A deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) is currently the most popular classification technique for image recognition. The proposed model is evaluated on the public UCI heart-disease dataset comprising 1050 patients and 14 attributes. By gathering a set of directly obtainable features from the heart-disease dataset, we considered this feature vector to be input for a DCNN to discriminate whether an instance belongs to a healthy or cardiac disease class. To assess the performance of the proposed method, different performance metrics, namely, accuracy, precision, recall, and the F1 measure, were employed, and our model achieved validation accuracy of 91.7%. The experimental results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in a real-world environment.