A novel proposed CNN–SVM architecture for ECG scalograms classification

Nowadays, the number of sudden deaths due to heart disease is increasing with the coronavirus pandemic. Therefore, automatic classification of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals is crucial for diagnosis and treatment. Thanks to deep learning algorithms, classification can be performed without manual feature extraction. In this study, we propose a novel convolutional neural networks (CNN) architecture to detect ECG types. In addition, the proposed CNN can automatically extract features from images. Here, we classify a real ECG dataset using our proposed CNN which includes 34 layers. While this dataset is one-dimensional signals, these are transformed into images (scalograms) using continuous wavelet transform (CWT). In addition, the proposed CNN is compared to known architectures: AlexNet and SqueezeNet for classifying ECG images, and we find it more effective than others. This study, which not only performed CWT but also implemented short-time Fourier transform, examines the success in recognizing ECG types for the proposed CNN. Besides, different split methods: training and testing, and cross-validation are applied in this study. Eventually, CWT and cross-validation are the best pre-processing and split methods for the proposed CNN, respectively. Although the results are quite good, we benefit from support vector machines (SVM) to obtain the best algorithm and for detecting ECG types. Essentially, the main aim of the study increases classification results. In this way, the proposed CNN is utilized as deep feature extractor and combined with SVM. As a conclusion of this study, we achieve the highest accuracy of 99.21% from the proposed CNN–SVM when using CWT. Therefore, we can express that this framework can be used as an aid to clinicians for ECG-type identification.