Cardiac Abnormality Detection in 12-lead ECGs with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks Using Data Augmentation

Abstract

A residual neural network was adapted and applied to the Physionet/Computing data in Cardiology Challenge 2020 to detect 24 different classes of cardiac abnormalities from 12-lead. Additive Gaussian noise, signal shifting, and the classification of signal sections of different lengths were applied to prevent the network from overfitting and facilitating generalization. Due to the use of a global pooling layer after the feature extractor, the network is independent of the signal's length. On the hidden test set of the challenge, the model achieved a validation score of 0.656 and a full test score of 0.27, placing us 15th out of 41 officially ranked teams (Team name: UC_Lab_Kn). These results show the potential of deep neural networks for application to raw data and a complex multi-class multi-label classification problem, even if the training data is from diverse datasets and of differing lengths.