Self-Organized Operational Neural Networks for The Detection of Atrial Fibrillation

Abstract Atrial fibrillation is a common cardiac arrhythmia, and its incidence increases with age. Currently, numerous deep learning methods have been proposed for AF detection. However, these methods either have complex structures or poor robustness. Given the evidence from recent studies, it is not surprising to observe the limitations in the learning performance of these approaches. This can be attributed to their strictly homogenous conguration, which solely relies on the linear neuron model. The limitations mentioned above have been addressed by operational neural networks (ONNs). These networks employ a heterogeneous network configuration, incorporating neurons equipped with diverse nonlinear operators. Therefore, in this study, to enhance the detection performance while maintaining computational efficiency, a novel model named multi-scale Self-ONNs (MSSelf-ONNs) was proposed to identify AF. The proposed model possesses a significant advantage and superiority over conventional ONNs due to their self-organization capability. Unlike conventional ONNs, MSSelf -ONNs eliminate the need for prior operator search within the operator set library to find the optimal set of operators. This unique characteristic sets MSSelf -ONNs apart and enhances their overall performance. To validate and evaluate the system, we have implemented the experiments on the well-known MIT-BIH atrial fibrillation database. The proposed model yields total accuracies and kappa coefficients of 98% and 0.95, respectively. The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed model outperform the state-of-the-art deep CNN in terms of both performance and computational complexity.