A Novel Hybrid Vision Transformer CNN for COVID-19 Detection from ECG Images

Abstract

The emergence of the novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China since 2019, has put the world in an exotic state of emergency and affected millions of lives. It is five times more deadly than Influenza and causes significant morbidity and mortality. COVID-19 mainly affects the pulmonary system leading to respiratory disorders. However, earlier studies indicated that COVID-19 infection may cause cardiovascular diseases, which can be detected using an electrocardiogram (ECG). This work introduces an advanced deep learning architecture for the automatic detection of COVID-19 and heart diseases from ECG images. In particular, a hybrid combination of the EfficientNet-B0 CNN model and Vision Transformer is adopted in the proposed architecture. To our knowledge, this study is the first research endeavor to investigate the potential of the vision transformer model to identify COVID-19 in ECG data. We carry out two classification schemes, a binary classification to identify COVID-19 cases, and a multi-class classification, to differentiate COVID-19 cases from normal cases and other cardiovascular diseases. The proposed method surpasses existing state-of-the-art approaches, demonstrating an accuracy of 100% and 95.10% for binary and multiclass levels, respectively. These results prove that artificial intelligence can potentially be used to detect cardiovascular anomalies caused by COVID-19, which may help clinicians overcome the limitations of traditional diagnosis.