Automatic diagnosis of the 12-lead ECG using a deep neural network

Abstract

The role of automatic electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis in clinical practice is limited by the accuracy of existing models. Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are models composed of stacked transformations that learn tasks by examples. This technology has recently achieved striking success in a variety of task and there are great expectations on how it might improve clinical practice. Here we present a DNN model trained in a dataset with more than 2 million labeled exams analyzed by the Telehealth Network of Minas Gerais and collected under the scope of the CODE (Clinical Outcomes in Digital Electrocardiology) study. The DNN outperform cardiology resident medical doctors in recognizing 6 types of abnormalities in 12-lead ECG recordings, with F1 scores above 80% and specificity over 99%. These results indicate ECG analysis based on DNNs, previously studied in a single-lead setup, generalizes well to 12-lead exams, taking the technology closer to the standard clinical practice.

Fig. 1. Abnormalities examples.

A list of all the abnormalities the model classifies. We show only three representative leads (DII, V1 and V6).

Fig. 2. Precision-recall curve.

Show precision-recall curve for our nominal prediction model on the test set (strong line) with regard to each ECG abnormalities. The shaded region shows the range between maximum and minimum precision for neural networks trained with the same configuration and different initialization. Points corresponding to the performance of resident medical doctors and students are also displayed, together with the point corresponding to the DNN performance for the same threshold used for generating Table 2. Gray dashed curves in the background correspond to iso-F₁ curves (i.e. curves in the precision-recall plane with constant F1 score).

Fig. 3. (DNN architecture).

The unidimensional residual neural network architecture used for ECG classification.