A Robustness Evaluation of Machine Learning Algorithms for ECG Myocardial Infarction Detection

Abstract

An automatic electrocardiogram (ECG) myocardial infarction detection system needs to satisfy several requirements to be efficient in real-world practice. These requirements, such as reliability, less complexity, and high performance in decision-making, remain very important in a realistic clinical environment. In this study, we investigated an automatic ECG myocardial infarction detection system and presented a new approach to evaluate its robustness and durability performance in classifying the myocardial infarction (with no feature extraction) under different noise types. We employed three well-known supervised machine learning models: support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbors (KNN), and random forest (RF), and tested the performance and robustness of these techniques in classifying normal (NOR) and myocardial infarction (MI) using real ECG records from the PTB database after normalization and segmentation of the data, with a suggested inter-patient paradigm separation as well as noise from the MIT-BIH noise stress test database (NSTDB). Finally, we measured four metrics: accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. The simulation revealed that all of the models performed well, with values of over 0.50 at lower SNR levels, in terms of all the metrics investigated against different types of noise, indicating that they are encouraging and acceptable under extreme noise situations are are thus considered sustainable and robust models for specific forms of noise. All of the methods tested could be used as ECG myocardial infarction detection tools in real-world practice under challenging circumstances.