This study illustrates the use of the neural network approach in the problem of diagnostic classification of resting 12-lead electrocardiograms. A large electrocardiographic library (the CORDA database established at the University of Leuven, Belgium) has been utilized in this study, whose classification is validated by electrocardiographic-independent clinical data. In particular, a subset of 3,253 electrocardiographic signals with single diseases has been selected. Seven diagnostic classes have been considered: normal, left, right, and biventricular hypertrophy, and anterior, inferior, and combined myocardial infarction. The basic architecture used is a feed-forward neural network and the backpropagation algorithm for the training phase. Sensitivity, specificity, total accuracy, and partial accuracy are the indices used for testing and comparing the results with classical methodologies. In order to validate this approach, the accuracy of two statistical models (linear discriminant analysis and logistic discriminant analysis) tune on the same dataset have been taken as the reference piont. Several nets have been trained, either adjusting some components of the architecture of the networks, considering subsets and clusters of the original learning set, or combining different neural networks. The results have confirmed the potentially and good performance of the connectionist approach when compared with classical methodologies.
