Automated Atrial Fibrillation Classification Based on Denoising Stacked Autoencoder and Optimized Deep Network

The incidences of atrial fibrillation (AFib) are increasing at a daunting rate worldwide. For the early detection of the risk of AFib, we have developed an automatic detection system based on deep neural networks. For achieving better classification, it is mandatory to have good pre-processing of physiological signals. Keeping this in mind, we have proposed a two-fold study. First, an end-to-end model is proposed to denoise the electrocardiogram signals using denoising autoencoders (DAE). To achieve denoising, we have used three networks including, convolutional neural network (CNN), dense neural network (DNN), and recurrent neural networks (RNN). Compared the three models and CNN based DAE performance is found to be better than the other two. Therefore, the signals denoised by the CNN based DAE were used to train the deep neural networks for classification. Three neural networks' performance has been evaluated using accuracy, specificity, sensitivity, and signal to noise ratio (SNR) as the evaluation criteria. The proposed end-to-end deep learning model for detecting atrial fibrillation in this study has achieved an accuracy rate of 99.20%, a specificity of 99.50%, a sensitivity of 99.50%, and a true positive rate of 99.00%. The average accuracy of the algorithms we compared is 96.26%, and our algorithm's accuracy is 3.2% higher than this average of the other algorithms. The CNN classification network performed better as compared to the other two. Additionally, the model is computationally efficient for real-time applications, and it takes approx 1.3 seconds to process 24 hours ECG signal. The proposed model was also tested on unseen dataset with different proportions of arrhythmias to examine the model's robustness, which resulted in 99.10% of recall and 98.50% of precision.