Risk Prediction for Cardiovascular Disease using ECG Data in the China Kadoorie Biobank

We set out to use machine learning techniques to analyse ECG data to improve risk evaluation of cardiovascular disease in a very large cohort study of the Chinese population. We performed this investigation by (i) detecting "abnormality" using 3 one-class classification methods, and (ii) predicting probabilities of "normality", arrhythmia, ischemia, and hypertrophy using a multiclass approach. For one-class classification, we considered 5 possible definitions for "normality" and used 10 automatically-extracted ECG features along with 4 blood pressure features. The one-class approach was able to identify abnormality with area-undercurve (AUC) 0.83, and with 75.6% accuracy. For four-class classification, we used 86 features in total, with 72 additional features extracted from the ECG. Accuracy for this four-class classifier reached 75.1%. The methods demonstrated proof-of-principle that cardiac abnormality can be detected using machine learning in a large cohort study.