Electrocardiogram Heartbeat Classification using Convolutional Neural Network-k Nearest Neighbor

Electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis is widely used by cardiologists and medical practitioners for monitoring cardiac health. A high-performance automatic ECG classification system is challenging because there is difficulty in detecting and categorizing different waveforms in the signal, especially in manual analysis of ECG signals, which means, a better classification system is needed in terms of performance and accuracy. Hence, in this paper, the authors propose an accurate ECG classification and monitoring system called convolutional neural network-k nearest neighbor (CNN-kNN). The proposed method utilizes 1D-CNN and kNN. Unlike the existing techniques, the examined technique does not need training during classifying the ECG signals. The CNN-kNN is evaluated against the PhysioNet’s MIT-BIH and PTB diagnostics datasets. The CNN is fed using the ECG beat raw signal directly. In addition, the learned features are extracted from the 1D-CNN model and its dimensions are reduced using two fully connected layers and then fed to the k-NN classifier. The CNN-kNN model achieved average accuracies of 98% and 97.4% on arrhythmia and myocardial infarction classifications, respectively. These results are evidence of the great ability of the proposed model compared to the mentioned models in this article.