Arrhythmia Classification Using CNN-SVM from ECG Spectrogram Representation

Arrhythmia, a critical subset of cardiovascular diseases and a leading cause of morbidity and mortality, is caused by irregular heartbeats that disrupt the normal rhythm of the heart. Detecting arrhythmias accurately is essential for timely diagnosis and treatment, which can be achieved through electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. This study presents a hybrid Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) model for arrhythmia classification, leveraging spectrogram representations of ECG signals. The CNN extracts spatial and temporal features from the spectrograms, while the SVM classifies five arrhythmia classes: Normal (N), Supra-ventricular premature (S), Ventricular escape (V), Fusion of ventricular and normal (F), and Unclassified (Q). Preprocessing techniques such as wavelet denoising and Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) were applied to improve signal quality and facilitate robust feature extraction. The proposed model was trained and evaluated on the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database, achieving a weighted F1-score of 0.985, demonstrating its ability to handle the imbalanced dataset effectively. Class-wise metrics highlighted high precision, recall, and F1-scores for majority classes and commendable performance for underrepresented classes, despite the inherent imbalance. These findings underscore the hybrid model's potential for arrhythmia classification by integrating the feature extraction strengths of CNNs with the precise classification capabilities of SVMs. Future research could address dataset imbalance through augmentation techniques and explore the model’s generalizability by testing on larger and more diverse datasets, paving the way for its application in real-world clinical scenarios.