Detection of heart arrhythmia with electrocardiography

Early detection of cardiac arrhythmia, a prevalent form of cardiovascular disease (CVD) impacting millions globally, is heavily reliant on the accurate analysis of heartbeats. Physicians often recommend that patients wear Holter monitors for 24 h or longer to observe concerning cardiac issues, resulting in the collection of substantial amounts of electrocardiogram (ECG) data. Consequently, there is a need to automate the process of interpreting ECGs to detect cardiac abnormalities efficiently. Current state-of-the-art studies rely on handcrafted feature extraction, which may not effectively capture the intricate temporal relationships inherent in ECG signal data. To address this limitation and facilitate the diagnosis of cardiac diseases, this study proposes a technique that converts electrocardiogram signals into images, subsequently training a deep learning model on the generated images. Image encoding techniques such as Gramian Angular Difference Field (GADF), Gramian Angular Summation Field (GASF) and Markov Transition Field (MTF) are employed to translate the ECG signals into images. The highest accuracy, 96.71%, was achieved by training the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model using the concatenation of these three image encoding techniques. The proposed approach is assessed using ECG recordings from the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database to detect heart arrhythmia, demonstrating the efficacy of the approach.