Intelligent Electrocardiogram Analysis in Medicine: Data, Methods, and Applications.

Electrocardiogram (ECG) is a low-cost, simple, fast, and non-invasive test. It can reflect the heart's electrical activity and provide valuable diagnostic clues about the health of the entire body. Therefore, ECG has been widely used in various biomedical applications such as arrhythmia detection, disease-specific detection, mortality prediction, and biometric recognition. In recent years, ECG-related studies have been carried out using a variety of publicly available datasets, with many differences in the datasets used, data preprocessing methods, targeted challenges, and modeling and analysis techniques. Here we systematically summarize and analyze the ECG-based automatic analysis methods and applications. Specifically, we first reviewed 22 commonly used ECG public datasets and provided an overview of data preprocessing processes. Then we described some of the most widely used applications of ECG signals and analyzed the advanced methods involved in these applications. Finally, we elucidated some of the challenges in ECG analysis and provided suggestions for further research.

MCA-net: A multi-task channel attention network for Myocardial infarction detection and location using 12-lead ECGs.

PROBLEM: Myocardial infarction (MI) is a classic cardiovascular disease (CVD) that requires prompt diagnosis. However, due to the complexity of its pathology, it is difficult for cardiologists to make an accurate diagnosis in a short period. AIM: In the clinical, MI can be detected and located by the morphological changes on a 12-lead electrocardiogram (ECG). Therefore, we need to develop an automatic, high-performance, and easily scalable algorithm for MI detection and location using 12-lead ECGs to effectively reduce the burden on cardiologists. METHODS: This paper proposes a multi-task channel attention network (MCA-net) for MI detection and location using 12-lead ECGs. It employs a channel attention network based on a residual structure to efficiently capture and integrate features from different leads. On top of this, a multi-task framework is used to additionally introduce the shared and complementary information between MI detection and location tasks to further enhance the model performance. RESULTS: Our method is evaluated on two datasets (The PTB and PTBXL datasets). It achieved more than 90% accuracy for MI detection task on both datasets. For MI location tasks, we achieved 68.90% and 49.18% accuracy on the PTB dataset, respectively. And on the PTBXL dataset, we achieved more than 80% accuracy. CONCLUSION: Numerous comparison experiments demonstrate that MCA-net outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and has a better generalization. Therefore, it can effectively assist cardiologists to detect and locate MI and has important implications for the early diagnosis of MI and patient prognosis.