Deep learning based ECG segmentation for delineation of diverse arrhythmias.

Accurate delineation of key waveforms in an ECG is a critical step in extracting relevant features to support the diagnosis and treatment of heart conditions. Although deep learning based methods using segmentation models to locate P, QRS, and T waves have shown promising results, their ability to handle arrhythmias has not been studied in any detail. In this paper we investigate the effect of arrhythmias on delineation quality and develop strategies to improve performance in such cases. We introduce a U-Net-like segmentation model for ECG delineation with a particular focus on diverse arrhythmias. This is followed by a post-processing algorithm which removes noise and automatically determines the boundaries of P, QRS, and T waves. Our model has been trained on a diverse dataset and evaluated against the LUDB and QTDB datasets to show strong performance, with F1-scores exceeding 99% for QRS and T waves, and over 97% for P waves in the LUDB dataset. Furthermore, we assess various models across a wide array of arrhythmias and observe that models with a strong performance on standard benchmarks may still perform poorly on arrhythmias that are underrepresented in these benchmarks, such as tachycardias. We propose solutions to address this discrepancy.
Competing Interests: I have read the journal’s policy and the authors of this manuscript have the following competing interests: CJ, TP, WK and OvK received financial support through NRF grants 2022R1A5A6000840 as well as RS-2022-00165404, NRF2023005562, funded by the Korean Government. SHK, SYO, JHJ, JSH, WJK and MJC received financial support through grants 1711174270, RS-2021-KD000008 funded by the Korean government. In addition, SHK, SYO, JHJ, JSH, WJK and MJC are Stockholders of Medifarmsoft Co., Ltd.
(Copyright: © 2024 Joung et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)