Interpatient Heartbeat Classification Using Modified Residual Attention Network With Two-Phase Training and Assistant Decision

State-of-the-art studies on automatic heartbeat classification have made efforts to improve supraventricular ectopic beat (SVEB) detection, but resulted in a low positive predictive value (PPV) of SVEB and poor performance of other categories under the interpatient paradigm. This article proposes a novel algorithm for heartbeat classification by the means of deep learning combined with feature extraction, which enhances the performance and can be applied to an automatic electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis. It is an improved residual attention network (IraNet) that combines attention module, residual inception block, and bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) layer to process single heartbeat segments directly. A two-phase training method is presented to change the weights in a planned way to deal with the imbalance of distinguishable features. An assistant decision for the deep learning-based model enhances the PPV of SVEB effectively. Under the interpatient paradigm on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Beth Israel Hosipital (MIT-BIH) arrhythmia database, the overall accuracy (Acc) of four classes achieves 0.9548. For SVEB class, the PPV is significantly improved to 0.7557 with the sensitivity (Sen) and an <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$F1$ </tex-math> score of 0.7392 and 0.7474, respectively. For ventricular ectopic beat (VEB) class, the Sen, PPV, and <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$F1$ </tex-math> score achieve 0.9575, 0.8500, and 0.9005, respectively, and the numbers are 0.9663, 0.9873, and 0.9767 for normal beat class. For fusion beat class, the numbers are 0.7964, 0.3597, and 0.4954, respectively. The proposed algorithm gets competitive results with the state-of-the-art studies, and there is a notable improvement in the detection of SVEB