Attention-Enhanced Convolutional Neural Network for Inter-patient Classification of Premature Ventricular Contraction from ECG

Meng Chen1, Yongjian Li1, Wenzhuo Shi2, Shoushui Wei1
1Shandong University, 2Institute of Marine Science and Technology, Shandong University


Abstract

Premature Ventricular Contractions (PVCs) are a common type of cardiac arrhythmia that can be life-threatening if left untreated. Using deep learning methods to address challenges such as data imbalance, inaccurate ECG segment labeling, and noise interference in PVC detection remains a significant endeavor. This study presents a dual-path CNN network (WACNN) designed based on wavelet decomposition and attention mechanisms for detecting PVCs from single-lead electrocardiograms (ECGs). All ECG recordings are firstly resampled to 256 Hz. The R-peak positions detected using the Pan-Tompkins method are firstly used to extract a 256 points fixed-duration as training set A, and then used to extract two complete RR intervals as another training set (B). Subsequently, all segments in training set B are resampled to 512 points, resulting in a rescaled training set C. Set B and set C are fed into the model through two separate paths for training. The ratio of the original segment length in B to 512 is considered as a critical infection feature (heart rate feature) for PVC detection in the model. The proposed model is trained on 11 recordings from the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database (MITAD) and validated on another 11 recordings, excluding pacemaker data. Testing is conducted on the remaining 22 recordings. On the test dataset, the model achieved a precision of 95.41%, recall of 98.72%, F1 score of 97.04%, and overall accuracy of 99.63%, outperforming most existing methods. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, which shows promise for enhancing PVC detection in long-term ECG monitoring scenarios.