A method for the automatic processing of the electrocardiogram (ECG) for the classification of heartbeats is presented. The method allocates manually detected heartbeats to one of the five beat classes recommended by ANSI/AAMI EC57:1998 standard, i.e., normal beat, ventricular ectopic beat (VEB), supraventricular ectopic beat (SVEB), fusion of a normal and a VEB, or unknown beat type. Data was obtained from the 44 nonpacemaker recordings of the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database. The data was split into two datasets with each dataset containing approximately 50000 beats from 22 recordings. The first dataset was used to select a classifier configuration from candidate configurations. Twelve configurations processing feature sets derived from two ECG leads were compared. Feature sets were based on ECG morphology, heartbeat intervals, and RR-intervals. All configurations adopted a statistical classifier model utilizing supervised learning. The second dataset was used to provide an independent performance assessment of the selected configuration. This assessment resulted in a sensitivity of 75.9%, a positive predictivity of 38.5%, and a false positive rate of 4.7% for the SVEB class. For the VEB class, the sensitivity was 77.7%, the positive predictivity was 81.9%, and the false positive rate was 1.2%. These results are an improvement on previously reported results for automated heartbeat classification systems.
