Document Type : Original Research Paper

Authors

• Motahareh Akbari Poodineh
• Fatemeh Zare Mehrjardi
• Mohsen Sardari Zarchi

Department of Computer Engineering, Meybod University, Meybod, Iran.

Abstract

Background and Objectives: Cardiovascular diseases, particularly cardiac arrhythmias, are among the leading causes of mortality worldwide. Early and accurate diagnosis is essential for improving patient outcomes. Although electrocardiogram (ECG) signals are widely used for arrhythmia detection, manual interpretation remains time consuming and error prone. Therefore, this study proposes an innovative, optimized two stage deep learning framework for the reliable diagnosis of cardiac arrhythmias from ECG signals, aiming to enhance both accuracy and robustness.
Methods: The key innovation lies in the first stage, where the autoencoder’s reconstruction error threshold is optimized using a Genetic Algorithm (GA) to maximize the separation between normal and abnormal signals. Only signals identified as abnormal proceed to the second stage, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that classifies them into four arrhythmia types (Supraventricular, Ventricular, Fusion, and Unknown beats). All experiments were conducted on the MIT BIH Arrhythmia Database using a stratified split, with SMOTE applied exclusively to the CNN training set to address class imbalance. Performance was evaluated through 5 fold cross validation.
Results: The proposed AE GA CNN+SMOTE framework achieved an average accuracy of 97.89 ± 0.25%, precision of 97.90 ± 0.24%, recall of 97.68 ± 0.29%, and an F1 score of 97.69 ± 0.28%. It outperformed the single stage CNN+SMOTE baseline by +6.28% in accuracy (p < 0.001) and showed statistically significant improvements over all other two stage variants (p < 0.05).
Conclusion: The two stage architecture, enhanced by GA driven threshold optimization and SMOTE balancing, demonstrates high accuracy and robustness for automated arrhythmia screening. The statistically validated performance gains support its potential as a decision support tool for clinical and real time ECG analysis.

Keywords

• Cardiac arrhythmia
• autoencoder
• convolutional neural network
• ECG signal
• genetic algorithm

Main Subjects

• Artificial Intelligence

Open Access

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Publisher

Shahid Rajaee Teacher Training University