Self-supervised learning for arrhythmia classification.

Abstract

Arrhythmias, heart diseases that are commonly diagnosed through electrocar- diograms (ECG), require computational methods for detection and classification to improve the physician’s diagnosis. Although there is abundant literature on the subject, the high intra-patient variability and noise of ECG signals pose challenges

in developing practical machine-learning models. To address this, we propose a cus- tomized adjustment of machine learning models through self-supervised learning with human-in-the-loop. Our approach introduces a pretext task called ECGWavePuzzle, which improves classification performance through better generalization. Evaluation metrics on the MIT-BIH database demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which improved the ECGnet global accuracy by over 10% and the Mousavi’s CNN by over 13%. Additionally, the experimental results demonstrated that the proposed approach improved the sensitivity and positive predictive value of the arrhythmic classes for certain patients.