Automatic multi-label diagnosis of single-lead ECG using novel hybrid residual recurrent convolutional neural networks

Arrhythmia is a prevalent cardiovascular disease that can unveil various heart health issues. In recent times, the rise of wearable devices has garnered attention towards the advantages of portable single-lead ECG devices in heart health monitoring. Achieving end-to-end ECG automatic diagnosis through deep learning is essential due to the time-consuming and labour-intensive characteristics of manual diagnosis of ECG records. This paper presents the design of a hybrid residual recurrent convolutional neural network (HRRCNN) for automatically diagnosing single-lead ECG with multiple labels. Firstly, the convolutional layers and residual networks extract the spatial and short-term temporal features. Subsequently, a hybrid recurrent neural network (RNN) comprised of a double-layer bidirectional gated recurrent unit (GRU) and a bidirectional long short-term memory (LSTM) is employed to capture long and short-term temporal features. Finally, an output layer, comprising an attention layer and a fully connected layer, converts the extracted features into classification results. To evaluate the performance of HRRCNN, a dataset from the Shanghai First People's Hospital Affiliated to Shanghai JiaoTong University(Shanghai General Hospital, SGH) is utilized. The experimental results demonstrate that HRRCNN achieves an accuracy of 95.08 %, F1-macro of 87.22 %, Sensitivity of 88.51 %, and a positive prediction rate of 86.13 %. Comparative analysis with existing methods underscores the superior performance of HRRCNN, thereby establishing its potential as an out-of-hospital heart health monitoring tool and an auxiliary tool in clinical settings.