Multi-objective evolution of artificial neural networks in multi-class medical diagnosis problems with class imbalance

This paper proposes a novel multi-objective optimisation approach to solving both the problem of finding good structural and parametric choices in an ANN and the problem of training a classifier with a heavily skewed data set. The state-of-the-art CMA-PAES-HAGA multi-objective evolutionary algorithm [41] is used to simultaneously optimise the structure, weights, and biases of a population of ANNs with respect to not only the overall classification accuracy, but the classification accuracies of each individual target class. The effectiveness of this approach is then demonstrated on a real-world multi-class problem in medical diagnosis (classification of fetal cardiotocograms) where more than 75% of the data belongs to the majority class and the rest to two other minority classes. The optimised ANN is shown to significantly outperform a standard feed-forward ANN with respect to minority class recognition at the cost of slightly worse performance in terms of overall classification accuracy

Automated detection of atrial fibrillation using long short-term memory network with RR interval signals

Atrial Fibrillation (AF), either permanent or intermittent (paroxysnal AF), increases the risk of cardioembolic stroke. Accurate diagnosis of AF is obligatory for initiation of effective treatment to prevent stroke. Long term cardiac monitoring improves the likelihood of diagnosing paroxysmal AF. We used a deep learning system to detect AF beats in Heart Rate (HR) signals. The data was partitioned with a sliding window of 100 beats. The resulting signal blocks were directly fed into a deep Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). The system was validated and tested with data from the MIT-BIH Atrial Fibrillation Database. It achieved 98.51% accuracy with 10-fold cross-validation (20 subjects) and 99.77% with blindfold validation (3 subjects). The proposed system structure is straight forward, because there is no need for information reduction through feature extraction. All the complexity resides in the deep learning system, which gets the entire information from a signal block. This setup leads to the robust performance for unknown data, as measured with the blind fold validation. The proposed Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) system can be used for long-term monitoring of the human heart. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed system is the first to incorporate deep learning for AF beat detection