Automatic arrhythmia detection with multi-lead ECG signals based on heterogeneous graph attention networks

Automatic arrhythmia detection is very important for cardiovascular health. It is generally performed by measuring the electrocardiogram (ECG) signals of standard multiple leads. However, the correlations of multiple leads are often ignored. In addition, an extensive and complex feature extraction process is usually needed in most existing studies. Therefore, these challenges will not only lead to the loss of overall lead information, but also cause the detection performance to depend on the quality of features. To solve these challenges, a novel multi-lead arrhythmia detection model based on a heterogeneous graph attention network is proposed in this paper. We have modeled the multi-lead data as a heterogeneous graph to integrate diverse information and construct intra-lead and inter-lead correlations in multi-lead data, providing a reasonable and effective the data model. A heterogeneous graph network with a dual-level attention strategy has been utilized to capture the interactions among diverse information and information types. At the same time, our model does not require any feature extraction process for the ECG signals, which avoids out complex feature engineering. Extensive experimental results show that multi-lead information and complex correlations can be well captured, thus confirming that the proposed model results in significant improvements in multi-lead arrhythmia detection.