The work presented here applies deep learning to the task of automated cardiac auscultation, i.e. recognizing abnormalities in heart sounds. We describe an automated heart sound classification algorithm that combines the use of time-frequency heat map representations with a deep convolutional neural network (CNN). Given the cost-sensitive nature of misclassification, our CNN architecture is trained using a modified loss function that directly optimizes the trade-off between sensitivity and specificity. We evaluated our algorithm at the 2016 PhysioNet Computing in Cardiology challenge where the objective was to accurately classify normal and abnormal heart sounds from single, short, potentially noisy recordings. Our entry to the challenge achieved a final specificity of 0.95, sensitivity of 0.73 and overall score of 0.84. We achieved the greatest specificity score out of all challenge entries and, using just a single CNN, our algorithm differed in overall score by only 0.02 compared to the top place finisher, which used an ensemble approach.
While there have been many previous efforts applied to automated heart sound analysis, gauging the success of historical approaches has been somewhat difficult, due to differences in dataset quality, number of recordings available for training and testing algorithms, recorded signal lengths and the environment in which data was collected (e.g. clinical vs. non-clinical settings). Moreover, some existing works have not performed appropriate train-test data splits and have reported results on training or validation data, which is highly likely to produce optimistic results due to overfitting @cite_27 . In this work, we report results from the 2016 PhysioNet Computing in Cardiology Challenge, which evaluated entries on a large test-set that was not made publicly available. To reduce overfitting, no recordings from the same subject were included in both the training and the test set and a variety of both and PCG recordings, which exhibited very poor signal quality, were included to encourage the development of accurate and robust algorithms.
@cite_27
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In this paper, we studied and validated a simple heart beat classifier based on ECG feature models selected with the focus on an improved generalization capability. We considered features from the RR series, as well as features computed from the ECG samples and different scales of the wavelet transform, at both avail able leads. The classification performance and generalization were studied using publicly available databases: the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia, the MIT-BIH Supraventricular Arrhythmia, and the St. Pe tersburg Institute of Cardiological Technics (INCART) databases. The Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation recommendations for class labeling and results presentation were followed. A floating feature selection algorithm was used to obtain the best performing and generalizing models in the training and validation sets for different search configurations. The best model found comprehends eight features, was trained in a partition of the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia, and was evaluated in a completely disjoint partition of the same database. The results obtained were: global accuracy of 93 ; for normal beats, sensitivity (S) 95 , positive predictive value (P+) 98 ; for supraventricular beats, S 11 , P+ 39 ; and for ventricular beats S 81 , P+ 87 . In order to test the generalization capability, performance was also evaluated in the INCART, with results comparable to those obtained in the test set. This classifier model has fewer features and performs better than other state-of-the-art methods with results suggesting better generalization capability.