Gawsalyan Sivapalan

Electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis is widely used in the diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases. This paper proposes an explainable rule-mining strategy for prioritizing abnormal class detection in ECG data. The proposed method utilizes a biased-trained Artificial Neural Network (ANN) with input features derived from an ECG beat sequence and formulates a set of rules at each node of an on-demand tree-like search algorithm. The rule base at each node is derived from a linear combination of the most impactful features identified using gradient analysis in an ANN. The final derived model is an explainable rule-based system that detects abnormal heartbeats based on statistical and morphological features from ECG. The model achieves the target sensitivity, and accuracy with a low run-time complexity through a comprehensive offline rule mining process and is trained using the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database. The system achieves an accuracy of 93% with only nine nodes and a test sensitivity of 90% and 80% respectively for VEB and SVEB beat types, when tested on previously unseen ECG data from the INCART database. The model performance and complexity can be easily adjusted based on the real-time resource constraints of a wearable sensor. The model was deployed on an ARM Cortex M4-based embedded device and is shown to achieve a >50% reduction in sensor power consumption when only abnormal beats are wirelessly transmitted. i.e RF transmission is gated using the model output and transmission is disabled when the subject’s ECG is normal. The proposed technique is highly suited for healthcare applications because of its explainability, lower complexity, and real-time flexibility when deployed in the Internet of Things (IoT) enabled wearable edge sensors.

In this paper, we propose a lightweight neural network for real-time electrocardiogram (ECG) anomaly detection and system level power reduction of wearable Internet of Things (IoT) Edge sensors. The proposed network utilizes a novel hybrid architecture consisting of Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) cells and Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLP). The LSTM block takes a sequence of coefficients representing the morphology of ECG beats while the MLP input layer is fed with features derived from instantaneous heart rate. Simultaneous training of the blocks pushes the overall network to learn distinct features complementing each other for making decisions. The network was evaluated in terms of accuracy, computational complexity, and power consumption using data from the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database. To address the class imbalance in the dataset, we augmented the dataset using SMOTE algorithm for network training. The network achieved an average classification accuracy of 97% across several records in the database. Further, the network was mapped to a fixed point model, retrained in a bit accurate fixed-point environment to compensate for the quantization error, and ported to an ARM Cortex M4 based embedded platform. In laboratory testing, the overall system was successfully demonstrated, and a significant saving of $\simeq \!\! 50\%$ power was achieved by gating the wireless transmission using the classifier. Wireless transmission was enabled only to transmit the beats deemed anomalous by the classifier. The proposed technique compares favourably with current methods in terms of computational complexity and has the advantage of stand-alone operation in the edge node, without the need for always-on wireless connectivity making it ideal for IoT wearable devices.