Hierarchical Deep Learning with Generative Adversarial Network for Automatic Cardiac Diagnosis from ECG Signals

Cardiac disease is the leading cause of death in the US. Accurate heart disease detection is of critical importance for timely medical treatment to save patients' lives. Routine use of electrocardiogram (ECG) is the most common method for physicians to assess the electrical activities of the heart and detect possible abnormal cardiac conditions. Fully utilizing the ECG data for reliable heart disease detection depends on developing effective analytical models. In this paper, we propose a two-level hierarchical deep learning framework with Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) for automatic diagnosis of ECG signals. The first-level model is composed of a Memory-Augmented Deep auto-Encoder with GAN (MadeGAN), which aims to differentiate abnormal signals from normal ECGs for anomaly detection. The second-level learning aims at robust multi-class classification for different arrhythmias identification, which is achieved by integrating the transfer learning technique to transfer knowledge from the first-level learning with the multi-branching architecture to handle the data-lacking and imbalanced data issue. We evaluate the performance of the proposed framework using real-world medical data from the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database. Experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms existing methods that are commonly used in current practice.