A CNN for Covid Detection using ECG signals

Federico Muscato1, Valentina Corino2, Massimo W Rivolta3, Pietro Cerveri2, Antonio Sanzo4, Alessandro Vicentini4, Roberto Sassi3, Luca Mainardi2
1Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano, 2Politecnico di Milano, 3Dipartimento di Informatica, Università degli Studi di Milano, 4Arrhythmia and Electrophysiology, and Coronary Care Unit, Fondazione IRCCS Policlinico S. Matteo


Abstract

We developed an end-to-end automatic algorithm for the detection of signs of COVID-19 virus infection in ECGs. We analyzed 12-lead ECGs from patients infected by COVID-19 (C-group) and from a control group (NC-group). The C-group (896 cases) included patients (age range [19-96] years) hospitalized at Ospedale San Matteo in Pavia (Italy) during the first 2020 pandemic outbreak. Infection was confirmed by nasal swab testing. The NC-group (also 896 cases) was built by collecting ECG in sinus rhythm from 3 datasets: Georgia ECG (USA), PTB-XL (Germany) and CPSC 2018 (China). Control ECGs were matched by gender, age and heart rate. An additional control group, only used for testing, was extracted from the Ningbo (China) database. A 4-layers convolutional neural network (CNN), with increasing filter size plus a final fully connected (FC) layer, was designed to classify C vs NC-group. The CNN was trained and k-fold cross validated (k=7) on 1536 ECGs (1316 for testing-220 for validation). Every fold model was used to classify the remaining, separate common test set of 256 ECGs. The accuracy was 0.86 ± 0.01 on validation, 0.86 ± 0.01 on the test set. The FPR on the NC-group was 0.14± 0.03 on validation, 0.13± 0.02 on test and 0.10± 0.01 on the Ningbo test set (p>0.05, ns) showing that no bias was induced by the selection of datasets.