rECGnition_v2.0: Self-Attentive Canonical Fusion of ECG and Patient Data using deep learning for effective Cardiac Diagnostics

The variability in ECG readings influenced by individual patient characteristics has posed a considerable challenge to adopting automated ECG analysis in clinical settings. A novel feature fusion technique termed SACC (Self Attentive Canonical Correlation) was proposed to address this. This technique is combined with DPN (Dual Pathway Network) and depth-wise separable convolution to create a robust, interpretable, and fast end-to-end arrhythmia classification model named rECGnition_v2.0 (robust ECG abnormality detection). This study uses MIT-BIH, INCARTDB and EDB dataset to evaluate the efficiency of rECGnition_v2.0 for various classes of arrhythmias. To investigate the influence of constituting model components, various ablation studies were performed, i.e. simple concatenation, CCA and proposed SACC were compared, while the importance of global and local ECG features were tested using DPN rECGnition_v2.0 model and vice versa. It was also benchmarked with state-of-the-art CNN models for overall accuracy vs model parameters, FLOPs, memory requirements, and prediction time. Furthermore, the inner working of the model was interpreted by comparing the activation locations in ECG before and after the SACC layer. rECGnition_v2.0 showed a remarkable accuracy of 98.07% and an F1-score of 98.05% for classifying ten distinct classes of arrhythmia with just 82.7M FLOPs per sample, thereby going beyond the performance metrics of current state-of-the-art (SOTA) models by utilizing MIT-BIH Arrhythmia dataset. Similarly, on INCARTDB and EDB datasets, excellent F1-scores of 98.01% and 96.21% respectively was achieved for AAMI classification. The compact architectural footprint of the rECGnition_v2.0, characterized by its lesser trainable parameters and diminished computational demands, unfurled several advantages including interpretability and scalability.