Automated Classification for Electrophysiological Data: Machine Learning Approaches for Disease Detection and Emotion Recognition

Abstract

Smart healthcare is a health service system that utilizes technologies, e.g., artificial intelligence and big data, to alleviate the pressures on healthcare systems. Much recent research has focused on the automatic disease diagnosis and recognition and, typically, our research pays attention on automatic classifications for electrophysiological signals, which are measurements of the electrical activity. Specifically, for electrocardiogram (ECG) and electroencephalogram (EEG) data, we develop a series of algorithms for automatic cardiovascular disease (CVD) classification, emotion recognition and seizure detection. With the ECG signals obtained from wearable devices, the candidate developed novel signal processing and machine learning method for continuous monitoring of heart conditions. Compared to the traditional methods based on the devices at clinical settings, the developed method in this thesis is much more convenient to use. To identify arrhythmia patterns from the noisy ECG signals obtained through the wearable devices, CNN and LSTM are used, and a wavelet-based CNN is proposed to enhance the performance. An emotion recognition method with a single channel ECG is developed, where a novel exploitative and explorative GWO-SVM algorithm is proposed to achieve high performance emotion classification. The attractive part is that the proposed algorithm has the capability to learn the SVM hyperparameters automatically, and it can prevent the algorithm from falling into local solutions, thereby achieving better performance than existing algorithms. A novel EEG-signal based seizure detector is developed, where the EEG signals are transformed to the spectral-temporal domain, so that the dimension of the input features to the CNN can be significantly reduced, while the detector can still achieve superior detection performance