Cardiac Arrhythmia Disease Classification Using LSTM Deep Learning Approach

Abstract

Many approaches have been tried for the classification of arrhythmia. Due to the dynamic nature of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals, it is challenging to use traditional handcrafted techniques, making a machine learning (ML) implementation attractive. Competent monitoring of cardiac arrhythmia patients can save lives. Cardiac arrhythmia prediction and classification has improved significantly during the last few years. Arrhythmias are a group of conditions in which the electrical activity of the heart is abnormal, either faster or slower than normal. It is the most frequent cause of death for both men and women every year in the world. This paper presents a deep learning (DL) technique for the classification of arrhythmias. The proposed technique makes use of the University of California, Irvine (UCI) repository, which consists of a high-dimensional cardiac arrhythmia dataset of 279 attributes. In this research, our goal was to classify cardiac arrhythmia patients into 16 classes depending on the characteristics of the electrocardiography dataset. The DL approach in the form of long short-term memory (LSTM) is an efficient technique to deal with reduced accuracy due to vanishing and exploding gradients in traditional DL frameworks for big data analysis. The goal of this research was to categorize cardiac arrhythmia patients by developing an efficient intelligent system using the LSTM DL algorithm. This approach to arrhythmia classification includes classification algorithms along with noise removal techniques. Therefore, we utilized principal components analysis (PCA) for noise removal, and LSTM for classification. This hybrid comprehensive arrhythmia classification approach performs better than previous approaches to arrhythmia classification. We attained a highest classification accuracy of 93.5% with the DL based disease classification system, and outperformed the earlier approaches used for cardiac arrhythmia classification.