MLBF-Net: A Multi-Lead-Branch Fusion Network for Multi-Class Arrhythmia Classification Using 12-Lead ECG

• Published in: IEEE journal of translational engineering in health and medicine Vol. 9; pp. 1 - 11
• Main Authors: Zhang, Jing, Liang, Deng, Liu, Aiping, Gao, Min, Chen, Xiang, Zhang, Xu, Chen, Xun
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 01.01.2021; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Arrhythmia; Arrhythmia classification; Artificial neural networks; Cardiac arrhythmia; Classification; co-optimization; Data integration; Data mining; deep learning; Electrocardiography; Feature extraction; Feature maps; Heart; Heart beat; Integrity; Lead; Machine learning; multi-lead ECG analysis; Optimization; Training; deep learning; Arrhythmia classification; co-optimization; multi-lead ECG analysis
• ISSN: 2168-2372; 2168-2372
• DOI: 10.1109/JTEHM.2021.3064675

Automatic arrhythmia detection using 12-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) signal plays a critical role in early prevention and diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases. In the previous studies on automatic arrhythmia detection, most methods concatenated 12 leads of ECG into a matrix, and then input the matrix to a variety of feature extractors or deep neural networks for extracting useful information. Under such frameworks, these methods had the ability to extract comprehensive features (known as integrity) of 12-lead ECG since the information of each lead interacts with each other during training. However, the diverse lead-specific features (known as diversity) among 12 leads were neglected, causing inadequate information learning for 12-lead ECG. To maximize the information learning of multi-lead ECG, the information fusion of comprehensive features with integrity and lead-specific features with diversity should be taken into account. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-Lead-Branch Fusion Network (MLBF-Net) architecture for arrhythmia classification by integrating multi-loss optimization to jointly learning diversity and integrity of multi-lead ECG. MLBF-Net is composed of three components: 1) multiple lead-specific branches for learning the diversity of multi-lead ECG; 2) cross-lead features fusion by concatenating the output feature maps of all branches for learning the integrity of multi-lead ECG; 3) multi-loss co-optimization for all the individual branches and the concatenated network. We demonstrate our MLBF-Net on China Physiological Signal Challenge 2018 which is an open 12-lead ECG dataset. The experimental results show that MLBF-Net obtains an average <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">F_{1} </tex-math></inline-formula> score of 0.855, reaching the highest arrhythmia classification performance. The proposed method provides a promising solution for multi-lead ECG analysis from an information fusion perspective.