# IMLE-Net: An Interpretable Multi-level Multi-channel Model for ECG Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.05116 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05116/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [MINA: Multilevel Knowledge-Guided Attention for Modeling Electrocardiography Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11333/) (2019)
- [Inter- and intra- patient ECG heartbeat classification for arrhythmia detection: a sequence to sequence deep learning approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07421/) (2018)
- [HAN-ECG: An Interpretable Atrial Fibrillation Detection Model Using Hierarchical Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05262/) (2020)
- [Interpreting Deep Neural Networks for Single-Lead ECG Arrhythmia Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05399/) (2020)
- [Beat by Beat: Classifying Cardiac Arrhythmias with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.06319/) (2017)
- [ECGNET: Learning where to attend for detection of atrial fibrillation with deep visual attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07422/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [MSW-Transformer: Multi-Scale Shifted Windows Transformer Networks for 12-Lead ECG Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12098/) (2023)
- [xLSTM-ECG: Multi-label ECG Classification via Feature Fusion with xLSTM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16101/) (2025)
- [A Dual-scale Lead-seperated Transformer With Lead-orthogonal Attention And Meta-information For Ecg Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12777/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Early detection of cardiovascular diseases is crucial for effective treatment and an electrocardiogram (ECG) is pivotal for diagnosis. The accuracy of Deep Learning based methods for ECG signal classification has progressed in recent years to reach cardiologist-level performance. In clinical settings, a cardiologist makes a diagnosis based on the standard 12-channel ECG recording. Automatic analysis of ECG recordings from a multiple-channel perspective has not been given enough attention, so it is essential to analyze an ECG recording from a multiple-channel perspective. We propose a model that leverages the multiple-channel information available in the standard 12-channel ECG recordings and learns patterns at the beat, rhythm, and channel level. The experimental results show that our model achieved a macro-averaged ROC-AUC score of 0.9216, mean accuracy of 88.85%, and a maximum F1 score of 0.8057 on the PTB-XL dataset. The attention visualization results from the interpretable model are compared against the cardiologist's guidelines to validate the correctness and usability.