A Deep Learning Approach for Detecting Atrial Fibrillation using RR Intervals of ECG

Purpose: Atrial Fibrillation (AF) is one of the most common types of heart arrhythmias observed in clinical practice. AF can be detected using an Electrocardiogram (ECG). ECG signals are time-varying and nonlinear in nature. Hence, it is very difficult for a physician to manually perform accurate and rapid classification of different heart rhythms. Materials and Methods: In this paper, we propose a method using Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) with db6 as the basis function for denoising ECG signal. Results: The denoised ECG is smoothened using the Savitzky- Golay filter. Deep learning methods, such as a combination of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) (CNN-LSTM) and ResNet18 are used for the accurate classification of ECG signals using Physionet Challenge 2017 database. Conclusion: With a 10-fold cross-validation method the model provided overall accuracy of 98.25% with the CNN-LSTM classifier.