Advancements in Artificial Intelligence for ECG Signal Analysis and Arrhythmia Detection: A Review

Context: With the widespread availability of portable electrocardiogram (ECG) devices, there is an increasing interest in utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) methods for ECG signal analysis and arrhythmia detection. The potential benefits of AI-assisted arrhythmia prognosis, early screening, and improved accuracy in arrhythmia classification are discussed. Evidence Acquisition: Artificial intelligence methods are a new way to classify different types of arrhythmias. For example, deep learning (DL) algorithms, including long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, convolutional neural networks (CNN), CNN-based autoencoders (AE), and convolutional recurrent neural networks (CRNN), have been extensively utilized for ECG signal analysis and arrhythmia detection. Results: This study explores different DL techniques for classifying arrhythmias. The two-dimensional (2D) CNN model achieved an accuracy of 97.42% in classifying five different arrhythmias. After classifying five types of ECG signals, an accuracy of 99.53% was achieved by the CNN-based AE and transfer learning (TL) models. The CNN-Bi-LSTM model achieved an accuracy of 98.0% in categorizing five categories of ECG signals. The CNN+LSTM model achieved an accuracy of 98.24% in classifying five classes of arrhythmias. The CNN-support vector machine (SVM) classifier model demonstrated an accuracy of 98.64% in detecting seventeen classes of heartbeats. The results indicated that the CNN-based AE and TL models perform exceptionally well with high accuracy in detecting ECG signals. Conclusions: The present study demonstrates the growing interest in utilizing DL for ECG signal detection in medical and healthcare applications over the past decade. Deep learning models have been shown to outperform experienced cardiologists, delivering state-of-the-art and more accurate results.