Design of a hybrid model for cardiac arrhythmia classification based on Daubechies wavelet transform

Background. Automation in cardiac arrhythmia classification helps medical professionals make accurate decisions about the patient's health. Objectives. The aim of this work was to design a hybrid classification model to classify cardiac arrhythmias. Material and methods. The design phase of the classification model comprises the following stages: preprocessing of the cardiac signal by eliminating detail coefficients that contain noise, feature extraction through Daubechies wavelet transform, and arrhythmia classification using a collaborative decision from the K nearest neighbor classifier (KNN) and a support vector machine (SVM). The proposed model is able to classify 5 arrhythmia classes as per the ANSI/AAMI EC57: 1998 classification standard. Level 1 of the proposed model involves classification using the KNN and the classifier is trained with examples from all classes. Level 2 involves classification using an SVM and is trained specifically to classify overlapped classes. The final classification of a test heartbeat pertaining to a particular class is done using the proposed KNN/SVM hybrid model. Results. The experimental results demonstrated that the average sensitivity of the proposed model was 92.56%, the average specificity 99.35%, the average positive predictive value 98.13%, the average F-score 94.5%, and the average accuracy 99.78%. Conclusions. The results obtained using the proposed model were compared with the results of discriminant, tree, and KNN classifiers. The proposed model is able to achieve a high classification accuracy.