The electrocardiogram (ECG) is one of the most extensively employed signals
used in the diagnosis and prediction of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). The ECG
signals can capture the heart's rhythmic irregularities, commonly known as
arrhythmias. A careful study of ECG signals is crucial for precise diagnoses of
patients' acute and chronic heart conditions. In this study, we propose a
two-dimensional (2-D) convolutional neural network (CNN) model for the
classification of ECG signals into eight classes; namely, normal beat,
premature ventricular contraction beat, paced beat, right bundle branch block
beat, left bundle branch block beat, atrial premature contraction beat,
ventricular flutter wave beat, and ventricular escape beat. The one-dimensional
ECG time series signals are transformed into 2-D spectrograms through
short-time Fourier transform. The 2-D CNN model consisting of four
convolutional layers and four pooling layers is designed for extracting robust
features from the input spectrograms. Our proposed methodology is evaluated on
a publicly available MIT-BIH arrhythmia dataset. We achieved a state-of-the-art
average classification accuracy of 99.11\%, which is better than those of
recently reported results in classifying similar types of arrhythmias. The
performance is significant in other indices as well, including sensitivity and
specificity, which indicates the success of the proposed method.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, accepted for future publication in Remote
Sensing MDPI Journa