Electrocardiogram pattern recognition and analysis based on artificial neural networks and support vector machines: a review.

Computer systems for Electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis support the clinician in tedious tasks (e.g., Holter ECG monitored in Intensive Care Units) or in prompt detection of dangerous events (e.g., ventricular fibrillation). Together with clinical applications (arrhythmia detection and heart rate variability analysis), ECG is currently being investigated in biometrics (human identification), an emerging area receiving increasing attention. Methodologies for clinical applications can have both differences and similarities with respect to biometrics. This paper reviews methods of ECG processing from a pattern recognition perspective. In particular, we focus on features commonly used for heartbeat classification. Considering the vast literature in the field and the limited space of this review, we dedicated a detailed discussion only to a few classifiers (Artificial Neural Networks and Support Vector Machines) because of their popularity; however, other techniques such as Hidden Markov Models and Kalman Filtering will be also mentioned

Computational Intelligence in Healthcare

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue Computational Intelligence in Healthcare that was published in Electronic

Electrocardiogram Monitoring Wearable Devices and Artificial-Intelligence-Enabled Diagnostic Capabilities: A Review

Worldwide, population aging and unhealthy lifestyles have increased the incidence of high-risk health conditions such as cardiovascular diseases, sleep apnea, and other conditions. Recently, to facilitate early identification and diagnosis, efforts have been made in the research and development of new wearable devices to make them smaller, more comfortable, more accurate, and increasingly compatible with artificial intelligence technologies. These efforts can pave the way to the longer and continuous health monitoring of different biosignals, including the real-time detection of diseases, thus providing more timely and accurate predictions of health events that can drastically improve the healthcare management of patients. Most recent reviews focus on a specific category of disease, the use of artificial intelligence in 12-lead electrocardiograms, or on wearable technology. However, we present recent advances in the use of electrocardiogram signals acquired with wearable devices or from publicly available databases and the analysis of such signals with artificial intelligence methods to detect and predict diseases. As expected, most of the available research focuses on heart diseases, sleep apnea, and other emerging areas, such as mental stress. From a methodological point of view, although traditional statistical methods and machine learning are still widely used, we observe an increasing use of more advanced deep learning methods, specifically architectures that can handle the complexity of biosignal data. These deep learning methods typically include convolutional and recurrent neural networks. Moreover, when proposing new artificial intelligence methods, we observe that the prevalent choice is to use publicly available databases rather than collecting new data

Computational Intelligence in Healthcare

The number of patient health data has been estimated to have reached 2314 exabytes by 2020. Traditional data analysis techniques are unsuitable to extract useful information from such a vast quantity of data. Thus, intelligent data analysis methods combining human expertise and computational models for accurate and in-depth data analysis are necessary. The technological revolution and medical advances made by combining vast quantities of available data, cloud computing services, and AI-based solutions can provide expert insight and analysis on a mass scale and at a relatively low cost. Computational intelligence (CI) methods, such as fuzzy models, artificial neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, and probabilistic methods, have recently emerged as promising tools for the development and application of intelligent systems in healthcare practice. CI-based systems can learn from data and evolve according to changes in the environments by taking into account the uncertainty characterizing health data, including omics data, clinical data, sensor, and imaging data. The use of CI in healthcare can improve the processing of such data to develop intelligent solutions for prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up, as well as for the analysis of administrative processes. The present Special Issue on computational intelligence for healthcare is intended to show the potential and the practical impacts of CI techniques in challenging healthcare applications

PORTABLE HEART ATTACK WARNING SYSTEM BY MONITORING THE ST SEGMENT VIA SMARTPHONE ELECTROCARDIOGRAM PROCESSING

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the single leading cause of death in both developed and developing countries. The most deadly CVD is heart attack, which 7,900,000 Americans suffer each year, and 16% of cases are fatal. The Electrocardiogram (ECG) is the most widely adopted clinical tool to diagnose and assess the risk of CVD. Early diagnosis of heart attacks, by detecting abnormal ST segments within one hour of the onset of symptoms, is necessary for successful treatment. In clinical settings, resting ECGs are used to monitor patients automatically. However, given the sporadic nature of heart attacks, it is unlikely that the patient will be in a clinical setting at the onset of a heart attack. While Holter-based portable monitoring solutions offer 24 to 48-hour ECG recording, they lack the capability of providing any real-time feedback for the thousands of heart beats they record, which must be tediously analyzed offline.Processing ECG signals on a smartphone-based platform would unite the portability of Holter monitors and the real-time processing capability of state-of-the-art resting ECG machines to provide an assistive diagnosis for early heart attack warning. Furthermore, smartphones serve as an ideal platform for telemedicine and alert systems and have a portable form factor. To detect heart attacks via ECG processing, a real-time, accurate, context aware ST segment monitoring algorithm, based on principal component analysis and a support vector machine classifier is proposed and evaluated. Real-time feedback is provided by implementing a state-of-the-art, multilevel warning system ranging from audible notifications to text messages to points of contacts with the GPS location of the user. The smartphone test bed makes use of a novel, real-time verification system using a streaming database to analyze the strain of heart attack detection system under normal phone operation. Furthermore, the entire system is prototyped and fully functional, running on a smartphone to demonstrate the real-time, portable functionality of the platform. Experimental results show that a classification accuracy of 96% for ST segment elevation of individual beats can be achieved and all ST episodes were correctly detected during testing with the European ST database

Algorithms for automated diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases based on ECG data: A comprehensive systematic review

The prevalence of cardiovascular diseases is increasing around the world. However, the technology is evolving and can be monitored with low-cost sensors anywhere at any time. This subject is being researched, and different methods can automatically identify these diseases, helping patients and healthcare professionals with the treatments. This paper presents a systematic review of disease identification, classification, and recognition with ECG sensors. The review was focused on studies published between 2017 and 2022 in different scientific databases, including PubMed Central, Springer, Elsevier, Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI), IEEE Xplore, and Frontiers. It results in the quantitative and qualitative analysis of 103 scientific papers. The study demonstrated that different datasets are available online with data related to various diseases. Several ML/DP-based models were identified in the research, where Convolutional Neural Network and Support Vector Machine were the most applied algorithms. This review can allow us to identify the techniques that can be used in a system that promotes the patient’s autonomy.N/

Intelligent Biosignal Processing in Wearable and Implantable Sensors

This reprint provides a collection of papers illustrating the state-of-the-art of smart processing of data coming from wearable, implantable or portable sensors. Each paper presents the design, databases used, methodological background, obtained results, and their interpretation for biomedical applications. Revealing examples are brain–machine interfaces for medical rehabilitation, the evaluation of sympathetic nerve activity, a novel automated diagnostic tool based on ECG data to diagnose COVID-19, machine learning-based hypertension risk assessment by means of photoplethysmography and electrocardiography signals, Parkinsonian gait assessment using machine learning tools, thorough analysis of compressive sensing of ECG signals, development of a nanotechnology application for decoding vagus-nerve activity, detection of liver dysfunction using a wearable electronic nose system, prosthetic hand control using surface electromyography, epileptic seizure detection using a CNN, and premature ventricular contraction detection using deep metric learning. Thus, this reprint presents significant clinical applications as well as valuable new research issues, providing current illustrations of this new field of research by addressing the promises, challenges, and hurdles associated with the synergy of biosignal processing and AI through 16 different pertinent studies. Covering a wide range of research and application areas, this book is an excellent resource for researchers, physicians, academics, and PhD or master students working on (bio)signal and image processing, AI, biomaterials, biomechanics, and biotechnology with applications in medicine

COMPUTER AIDED DIAGNOSIS OF VENTRICULAR ARRHYTHMIAS FROM ELECTROCARDIOGRAM LEAD II SIGNALS

In this work, we use computer aided diagnosis (CADx) to extract features from ECG signals and detect different types of cardiac ventricular arrhythmias including Ventricular Tachycardia (VT),Ventricular Fibrillation (VF), Ventricular Couplet (VC), and Ventricular Bigeminy (VB).Our methodology is unique in computing features of lower and higher order statistical parameters from six different data domains: time domain, Fourier domain, and four Wavelet domains (Daubechies, Coiflet, Symlet, and Meyer). These features proved to give superior classification performance, in general, regardless of the type of classifier used as compared with previous studies. However, Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) classifiers got better performance than other classifiers tried including KNN and Naïve Bayes classifiers. Our unique features enabled classifiers to perform better in comparison with previous studies: for VT, 100% accuracy while best previous work got 95.8%, for VF, 100% accuracy while best previous work got 97.5%, for VC, 100% sensitivity while best previous work got 71.8%, and for VB, 100% sensitivity while best previous work got 84.6%