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Overview of a Typical Electrocardiogram Classification Framework . 22

12-lead ECG of normal sinus rhythm is illustrated in Figure 2.6. The variation in morphological features of multilead ECG such as amplitude, duration, and shape of local characteristic waves are indicators of life-threatening cardiac ailments [71]. The cardiologist examines the aforementioned components of ECG for diagnosing cardiac abnormalities [52].

I

II

III

aVR

aVL

aVF

V1

V2

V3

V4

V5

V6

Figure 2.6: Standard 12-Lead ECG Waveform depicting Normal Sinus Rhythm.

2.2 Overview of a Typical Electrocardiogram Clas- sification Framework

The cardiologist examines standard 12-lead ECG for detecting life-threatening cardiac abnormalities [52]. However, the large amount of data generated during continuous recording of 12-lead ECG makes it difficult for the cardiologist to manually inspect the ECG for diagnosing cardiac ailments. In addition, the human eye is poorly suited to detect the morphological and temporal variation in ECG signals. Therefore, the need for a Computer-Aided Disease Diagnostic System (CADDS) is urgent to assist the cardiologist in diagnosing the cardiac abnormalities [72]. Figure 2.7 illustrates CADDS which consists of ECG preprocessing stage, diagnostic information extrac- tion stage, classification stage, and decision explanation stage [73]. The preprocessing stage involves ECG filtering, segmentation, and augmentation (depends on data dis- tribution). The classification stage performs feature extraction using signal process- ing techniques, and the extracted diagnostic information is classified into one or more cardiac abnormalities. In the last stage, the diagnosis are explained to the physician using interpretability techniques.

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2. BACKGROUND

Data Augmentation using SMOTE, ADASYN or GAN Preprocessing

R-Peak Detection

Classifier CNN or RNN Interpretability / Explainability

PostHoc Technique Implicit (Model Specific) Example Based Explanations Treatment

Single Lead ECG Rhythm Multichannel

ECG

Preprocessing Single Lead

ECG

CPR

Figure 2.7: Computer Aided Disease Diagnostic System.

2.2.1 Denoising ECG Signal

Low and high-frequency noises distort the ECG signal during acquisition and make the subsequent processing challenging [74]. For effective analysis, the signal has to be denoised from embedded noises [75]. The interfering noise could be originating from different sources such as Power line interference (PLI) [76, 77], Baseline Wander (BW) [76, 78], Muscle artefacts (MA) [79], and Channel Noise (CN) [80]. Table 2.1 describe the characteristics of different noise sources present in ECG signal [75]. The noises change the amplitude of the ECG signal, degrade the PQRST morphology, and finally hinder the doctors in analyzing the signal and increase the chances of wrong diagnosis [81, 82]. The noises could be removed using various filtering techniques, wavelet transform and signal decomposition techniques. Chatterjee et al. [75] provided a review of several noise removal techniques in ECG signals. The preprocessing stage is followed by heartbeat segmentation from a single lead ECG.

Table 2.1: Characteristics of different noise sources present in ECG signal.

Type Causes Changes Frequency Effects

BW [76, 78]

Body Movement, Respiration, Bad Electrode Contact, Skin-Electrode Impedance

Depending on skin impedance electrode-electrolyte property

and subject movement.

Between 0.05 and 1 Hz. Distorts ST-segment, other LF components.

PLI [76, 77]

Inductive and capacitive couplings of 50/60 Hz during acquisition.

50% of the peak-to-peak ECG signal amplitude.

Narrowband centered at 50 60Hz with bandwidth<1Hz

Distortion in duration and amplitude.

MA [79]

Muscle activity arising from eyes, muscle, neck movement, swallowing.

10% of the peak-to-peak ECG signal amplitude.

Bandwidth ranges between 20 and 1000 Hz

Alter shapes of local waves of ECG signal

CN [80] Transmission Channel

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2.2. OVERVIEW OF A TYPICAL ELECTROCARDIOGRAM CLASSIFICATION FRAMEWORK

2.2.2 Heartbeat Segmentation from Single Lead ECG

Heartbeats extracted from ECG signals might indicate the occurrence of irregular or arrhythmic beats that are a precursor to determining several heart diseases such as arrhythmias, making heartbeat segmentation necessary [13]. The detected beats serve as a reference for detecting other characteristic waves and extracting heart rate features, ST segments to detect heart rhythm abnormalities or abnormal heartbeats.

An ideal heartbeat constitutes a P-wave, QRS-complex, and T-wave. The QRS com- plex is the most striking waveform that plays a significant role in the detection of arrhythmias and irregular rhythms [83]. Widely used Holter monitors include a QRS detector that records ECG when arrhythmia appears and these recorded segments are further interpreted by cardiologists. These devices require accurate QRS detec- tors, which minimizes false negative and false positive rates so that no unnecessary transmission occurs, and the device does not need massive memory to store ECG segments [84]. QRS detection is difficult because of the physiological variability, and various noises present in the ECG signal [85]. QRS detection has been researched in the past three decades and a detailed discussion is provided in Section 3.2. The detected beats are provided to a classifier that performs heartbeat classification.

2.2.3 Synthesising ECG Signals

An ECG classifier achieves state-of-the-art performance using a massive amount of labeled, diverse, and realistic-looking ECGs [86]. Acquisition of high-quality nor- mal and arrhythmic class ECGs is difficult. Often, the access to personal ECGs is restricted due to privacy concerns, hindering the development of a generalized clas- sifier [87]. In addition, the public databases sometimes fail to satisfy a particular criterion concerning a study as they might miss out on relevant information, necessi- tating ECG synthesis [88]. Data imbalance could be mitigated through augmentation, improving model performance [89]. ECG synthesis is challenging because the biolog- ical and physiological systems generating these signals are complex. Synthesis could be performed using the traditional augmentation techniques such as Synthetic minor- ity oversampling technique (SMOTE) [42], Borderline SMOTE using Support Vector Machine [43], and Adaptive synthetic (ADASYN) sampling approach [44]. Recently developed Generative models [90] could also be employed to synthesize class-specific ECG signals [87, 91]. The augmented signals mitigate the problem of data imbalance and provide sufficient data to develop a generalized classifier that could, in practice, be deployed in real-world scenarios.

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2. BACKGROUND

2.2.4 Classification using Deep Learning Models

An ideal classifier should correctly perform disease diagnosis of a new patient without their prior information [92]. It should be able to cope with the inter-patient vari- ability as similar cardiac abnormalities might have different waveforms for different subjects with CVD, and different cardiac diseases may have similar waveform resem- blance [93]. Cardiac abnormalities such as Atrial and Ventricular Fibrillation appear rhythmically with varying episode lengths, where smaller segments might miss an abnormal rhythm, and larger segments might not localize the segment responsible for arrhythmic rhythm, making segment classification necessary [94, 95]. The rhythmic cardiac abnormalities can be prevented through early-stage heartbeat classification as irregular heartbeats are precursors to life-threatening arrhythmias. Although single lead devices are portable, they suffer from limited resolution. Therefore, multichannel ECG is used, which provides better resolution and captures a large variety of cardiac abnormalities [8, 46]. The extracted heartbeats, single-lead ECG segments, and mul- tichannel ECG segments could be classified using traditional machine learning (ML) classifiers with handcrafted features or deep learning models (DLM). Handcrafted fea- tures include time and frequency domain features, morphological features, statistical features, entropy features that extract information from ECG [96]. These features are classified using traditional ML classifiers; namely, support vector machine, naive bayes, boosting classifier, and linear classifiers [96]. In contrast, DLM perform end- to-end ECG classification and achieve state-of-the-art performance [97–99]. DLM extracts complicated and abstract features from the raw ECG signals. Figure 2.8 summarizes different approaches for detecting cardiac abnormalities from ECG sig- nals. The rule-based methods do not have ML modules and rely on handcrafted features. Transforming medical knowledge into hard-coded rules for computers is more challenging. Therefore, the ML methods and DLM are widely used for ECG classification.

2.2.5 Interpreting Model Diagnosis

Researchers have demonstrated commendable performance of DLM, yet they lack practical deployment due to lack of interpretability, or black-box nature, which in- hibits the model from explaining its predictions [100–102]. According to General Data Protection Regulation [103], the reasons behind the model’s predictions are as im- portant as the prediction. Especially in the medical domain, the explanation behind diagnosis is also necessary to support the model decisions. The problem of the black TH-2764_156201001