A New Approach to Detection of ECG Arrhythmias: Complex Discrete Wavelet Transform Based Complex Valued Artificial Neural Network

This paper presents the new automated detection method for electrocardiogram (ECG) arrhythmias. The detection system is implemented with integration of complex valued feature extraction and classification parts. In feature extraction phase of proposed method, the feature values for each arrhythmia are extracted using complex discrete wavelet transform (CWT). The aim of using CWT is to compress data and to reduce training time of network without decreasing accuracy rate. Obtained complex valued features are used as input to the complex valued artificial neural network (CVANN) for classification of ECG arrhythmias. Ten types of the ECG arrhythmias used in this study were selected from MIT-BIH ECG Arrhythmias Database. Two different classification tasks were performed by the proposed method. In first classification task (CT-1), whether CWT-CVANN can distinguish ECG arrhythmia from normal sinus rhythm was examined one by one. For this purpose, nine classifiers were improved and executed in CT-1. Second classification task (CT-2) was to recognize ten different ECG arrhythmias by one complex valued classifier with ten outputs. Training and test sets were formed by mixing the arrhythmias in a certain order. Accuracy rates were obtained as 99.8% (averaged) and 99.2% for the first and second classification tasks, respectively. All arrhythmias in training and test phases were classified correctly for both of the classification tasks.