Improving ECG Classification Performance by Using an Optimized One-Dimensional Residual Network Model

Cardiovascular disease and its consequences on human health have never stopped and even show a trend of appearing in increasingly younger generations. The establishment of an excellent deep learning algorithm model to assist physicians in identifying and the early screening of ECG abnormalities can effectively improve the accuracy of diagnosis. Therefore, in this study, the deep residual network model is adapted for feature extraction and classification of ECG signals by pooling embedded into layers and double channel connection. At the same time, the wavelet adaptive threshold denoising algorithm is used to complete the high signal-to-noise filtering of ECG signals. Then, the alternate pooling residual network (APRN) is compared with the convolutional neural network (CNN), CNN with one residual unit (CNN-R), and the deep residual network (ResNet-18) using ECG datasets from the American MIT-BIH arrhythmia and ST segment abnormality database, European ST-T database, and sudden cardiac death ambulatory ECG database. The results are as follows: The average classification accuracy of the APRN on the four datasets is 97.89%, while the accuracies on CNN, CNN-R, and ResNet-18 are 97.17%, 97.53%, and 97.73%, respectively. In addition, compared with ResNet-18, the classification accuracy of our APRN on each class of data improves by 16.44% in total.