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Objective: The electrocardiogram (ECG) provides an effective, non-invasive approach for clinical diagnosis in patients with cardiac diseases such as atrial fibrillation (AF). AF is the most common cardiac rhythm disturbance and affects ~2% of the general population in industrialized countries. Automatic AF detection in clinics remains a challenging task due to the high inter-patient variability of ECGs, and unsatisfactory existing approaches for AF diagnosis (e.g. atrial or ventricular activity-based analyses). Approach: We have developed RhythmNet, a 21-layer 1D convolutional recurrent neural network, trained using 8528 single-lead ECG recordings from the 2017 PhysioNet/Computing in Cardiology (CinC) Challenge, to classify ECGs of different rhythms including AF automatically. Our RhythmNet architecture contained 16 convolutions to extract features directly from raw ECG waveforms, followed by three recurrent layers to process ECGs of varying lengths and to detect arrhythmia events in long recordings. Large 15  ×  1 convolutional filters were used to effectively learn the detailed variations of the signal within small time-frames such as the P-waves and QRS complexes. We employed residual connections throughout RhythmNet, along with batch-normalization and rectified linear activation units to improve convergence during training. Main results: We evaluated our algorithm on 3658 testing data and obtained an F1 accuracy of 82% for classifying sinus rhythm, AF, and other arrhythmias. RhythmNet was also ranked 5th in the 2017 CinC Challenge. Significance: Potentially, our approach could aid AF diagnosis in clinics and be used for patient self-monitoring to improve the early detection and effective treatment of AF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]