Sparse learned kernels for interpretable and efficient medical time series processing

Rapid, reliable and accurate interpretation of medical time series signals is crucial for high-stakes clinical decision-making. Deep learning methods offered unprecedented performance in medical signal processing but at a cost: they were compute intensive and lacked interpretability. We propose sparse mixture of learned kernels (SMoLK), an interpretable architecture for medical time series processing. SMoLK learns a set of lightweight flexible kernels that form a single-layer sparse neural network, providing not only interpretability but also efficiency, robustness and generalization to unseen data distributions. We introduce parameter reduction techniques to reduce the size of SMoLK networks and maintain performance. We test SMoLK on two important tasks common to many consumer wearables: photoplethysmography artefact detection and atrial fibrillation detection from single-lead electrocardiograms. We find that SMoLK matches the performance of models orders of magnitude larger. It is particularly suited for real-time applications using low-power devices, and its interpretability benefits high-stakes situations. Deep learning excels in medical signal processing but lacks interpretability. An efficient, interpretable architecture that matches the performance of larger models at orders of magnitude fewer parameters in tasks common to wearable devices has been proposed.