Cardiac Arrhythmia, CHF, and NSR Classification With NCA-Based Feature Fusion and SVM Classifier

An arrhythmia is an irregular heartbeat that causes abnormal heart rhythms. Manual analysis of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals is not sufficient to quickly detect cardiac arrhythmias. This study proposes a deep learning approach based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture for the classification of cardiac arrhythmias (ARR), congestive heart failure (CHF), and normal sinus rhythm (NSR). First, the ECG signal is converted into a 2D image using time-frequency conversion. The scalogram is constructed using a continuous wavelet transform to extract dynamic features. With CNN, each ECG signal is broken down into heartbeats, and then each heartbeat is converted into a 2D grayscale image of the heartbeat. Morphological feature extraction was performed by segmenting the QRS complex and detecting P and T waves. A third approach to feature extraction is dual-tree complex wavelet transform (DT-CWT). In addition, all extracted features are combined using neighborhood component analysis (NCA), and features are selected to classify using a support vector machine (SVM) classifier.