BeatClass: A Sustainable ECG Classification System in IoT-Based eHealth

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), it becomes convenient to use mobile devices to remotely monitor the physiological signals (e.g., Arrhythmia diseases) of patients with chronic diseases [e.g., cardiovascular diseases (CVDs)]. High classification accuracy of interpatient electrocardiograms is extremely important for diagnosing Arrhythmia. The Supraventricular ectopic beat (S) is especially difficult to be classified. It is often misclassified as Normal (N) or Ventricular ectopic beat (V). Class imbalance is another common and important problem in electronic health (eHealth), as abnormal samples (i.e., samples of specific diseases) are usually far less than normal samples. To solve these problems, we propose a sustainable deep learning-based heart beat classification system, called BeatClass. It contains three main components: two stacked bidirectional long short-term memory networks (Bi-LSTMs), called Rist and Morst, and a generative adversarial network (GAN), called MorphGAN. Rist first classifies the heartbeats into five common Arrhythmia classes. The heartbeats classified as S and V by Rist are further classified by Morst to improve the classification accuracy. MorphGAN is used to augment the morphological and contextual knowledge of heartbeats in infrequent classes. In the experiment, BeatClass is compared with several state-of-the-art works for interpatient arrhythmia classification. The Fl-scores of classifying N, S, and V heartbeats are 0.6%, 16.0%, and 1.8% higher than the best baseline method. The experimental result demonstrates that taking multiple classification models to improve classification results step-by-step may significantly improve the classification performance. We also evaluate the classification sustainability of BeatClass. Based on different physical signal data sets, a trained BeatClass can be updated to classify heartbeats with different sampling rates. Finally, an engineering application indicates that BeatClass can promote the sustainable development of IoT-based eHealth.