Searching for Premature Ventricular Contraction from Electrocardiogram by Using One-Dimensional Convolutional Neural Network

Abstract

Premature ventricular contraction (PVC) is a common cardiac arrhythmia that can occur in ordinary healthy people and various heart disease patients. Clinically, cardiologists usually use a long-term electrocardiogram (ECG) as a medium to detect PVC. However, it is time-consuming and labor-intensive for cardiologists to analyze the long-term ECG accurately. To this end, this paper suggests a simple but effective approach to search for PVC from the long-term ECG. The recommended method first extracts each heartbeat from the long-term ECG by applying a fixed time window. Subsequently, the model based on the one-dimensional convolutional neural network (CNN) tags these heartbeats without any preprocessing, such as denoise. Unlike previous PVC detection methods that use hand-crafted features, the proposed plan rationally and automatically extracts features and identify PVC with supervised learning. The proposed PVC detection algorithm acquires 99.64% accuracy, 96.97% sensitivity, and 99.84% specificity for the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database. Besides, when the number of samples in the training set is 3.3 times that of the test set, the proposed method does not misjudge any heartbeat from the test set. The simulation results show that it is reliable to use one-dimensional CNN for PVC recognition. More importantly, the overall system does not rely on complex and cumbersome preprocessing.