Dual-input neural network integrating feature extraction and deep learning for coronary artery disease detection using electrocardiogram and phonocardiogram

Abstract

Electrocardiogram (ECG) and phonocardiogram (PCG) signals reflect the electrical and mechanical activities of the heart, respectively. Although studies have documented that some abnormalities in ECG and PCG signals are associated with coronary artery disease (CAD), only few researches have combined the two signals for automatic CAD detection. This paper aims to differentiate between CAD and non-CAD groups using simultaneously collected ECG and PCG signals. To entirely exploit the underlying information in these signals, a novel dual-input neural network that integrates the feature extraction and deep learning methods is developed. First, the ECG and PCG features are extracted from multiple domains, and the information gain ratio is used to select important features. On the other hand, the ECG signal and the decomposed PCG signal (at four scales) are concatenated as a five-channel signal. Then, the selected features and the five-channel signal are fed into the proposed network composed of a fully connected model and a deep learning model. The results show that the classification performance of either feature extraction or deep learning is insufficient when using only ECG or PCG signal, and combining the two signals improves the performance. Further, when using the proposed network, the best result is obtained with accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and G-mean of 95.62%, 98.48%, 89.17%, and 93.69%, respectively. Comparisons with existing studies demonstrate that the proposed network can effectively capture the combined information of ECG and PCG signals for the recognition of CAD.