FusionAtt: Deep Fusional Attention Networks for Multi-Channel Biomedical Signals

Abstract

Recently, pervasive sensing technologies have been widely applied to comprehensive patient monitoring in order to improve clinical treatment. Various types of biomedical signals collected by different sensing channels provide different aspects of patient health information. However, due to the uncertainty and variability in clinical observation, not all the channels are relevant and important to the target task. Thus, in order to extract informative representations from multi-channel biosignals, channel awareness has become a key enabler for deep learning in biosignal processing and has attracted increasing research interest in health informatics. Towards this end, we propose FusionAtt—a deep fusional attention network that can learn channel-aware representations of multi-channel biosignals, while preserving complex correlations among all the channels. FusionAtt is able to dynamically quantify the importance of each biomedical channel, and relies on more informative ones to enhance feature representation in an end-to-end manner. We empirically evaluated FusionAtt in two clinical tasks: multi-channel seizure detection and multivariate sleep stage classification. Experimental results showed that FusionAtt consistently outperformed the state-of-the-art models in four different evaluation measurements, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed fusional attention mechanism.