Quality evaluation of signals collected by portable ECG devices using dimensionality reduction and flexible model integration

OBJECTIVE: Portable devices for collecting electrocardiograms (ECGs) and telemedicine systems for diagnosis are available to residents in deprived areas, but ECGs collected by non-professionals are not necessarily reliable and may impair the accuracy of diagnosis. We propose an algorithm for accurate ECG quality assessment, which can help improve the reliability of ECGs collected by portable devices. APPROACH: Using challenge data from CinC (2019), signals were classified as 'acceptable' and 'unacceptable' by annotators. The training set contained 998 12-lead ECGs and the test set contained 500. A 998 × 84 feature matrix, S, was formed by feature extraction and three basic models were obtained through training SVM, DT and NBC on S. The feature subsets S1, S2 and S3 were obtained by dimensionality reduction on S using SVM, DT and NBC, respectively. Three other basic models were obtained through training SVM on S1, DT on S2 and NBC on S3. By combining these six basic models, several integrated models were formed. An iterative method was proposed to select the integrated model with the highest accuracy on the training set. Having compared differences between the output labels and the original data labels, evaluation criteria were calculated. MAIN RESULTS: An accuracy of 98.70% and 98.60% was achieved on the training and test datasets, respectively. High F1 score and Kappa values were also obtained. SIGNIFICANCE: The proposed algorithm has advantages over previously reported approaches during automatic assessment of ECG quality and can thus help to reduce reliance on highly trained professionals when assessing the quality of ECGs.