ECG-based cardiac arrhythmias detection through ensemble learning and fusion of deep spatial–temporal and long-range dependency features.

Cardiac arrhythmia is one of the prime reasons for death globally. Early diagnosis of heart arrhythmia is crucial to provide timely medical treatment. Heart arrhythmias are diagnosed by analyzing the electrocardiogram (ECG) of patients. Manual analysis of ECG is time-consuming and challenging. Hence, effective automated detection of heart arrhythmias is important to produce reliable results. Different deep-learning techniques to detect heart arrhythmias such as Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Transformer, and Hybrid CNN–LSTM were proposed. However, these techniques, when used individually, are not sufficient to effectively learn multiple features from the ECG signal. The fusion of CNN and LSTM overcomes the limitations of CNN in the existing studies as CNN–LSTM hybrids can extract spatiotemporal features. However, LSTMs suffer from long-range dependency issues due to which certain features may be ignored. Hence, to compensate for the drawbacks of the existing models, this paper proposes a more comprehensive feature fusion technique by merging CNN, LSTM, and Transformer models. The fusion of these models facilitates learning spatial, temporal, and long-range dependency features, hence, helping to capture different attributes of the ECG signal. These features are subsequently passed to a majority voting classifier equipped with three traditional base learners. The traditional learners are enriched with deep features instead of handcrafted features. Experiments are performed on the MIT-BIH arrhythmias database and the model performance is compared with that of the state-of-art models. Results reveal that the proposed model performs better than the existing models yielding an accuracy of 99.56%. • This paper proposes a rich feature fusion technique for cardiac arrhythmia detection from ECG by merging three deep learning models, namely, CNN, CNN–LSTM, and Transformer. • Integrating these models combines the advantages of all these individual models, overcomes their limitations, and learns significant features from the input ECG signal. • The deep spatial, temporal, and long-range dependency patterns learned by the aforementioned models are fused via concatenation and fed to a majority voting classifier with three traditional base learners: SVM, LR, and RF. • MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database is used for experimentation. A comparison of the results with the baseline models and state-of-the-art models shows that the proposed model outdoes the existing models achieving an accuracy of 95.56% and an F-score of 99.34%. • The results show that the proposed model outperforms the existing models in terms of precision, recall, F-score, and accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]