Papers › Atrial Fibrillation Detection Using Deep Features and Convolutional Networks

Atrial Fibrillation Detection Using Deep Features and Convolutional Networks

28 Mar 2019arXiv:1903.11775archive 2025-07-28

Sara Ross-Howe, H. R. Tizhoosh

Atrial fibrillation is a cardiac arrhythmia that affects an estimated 33.5 million people globally and is the potential cause of 1 in 3 strokes in people over the age of 60. Detection and diagnosis of atrial fibrillation (AFIB) is done noninvasively in the clinical environment through the evaluation of electrocardiograms (ECGs). Early research into automated methods for the detection of AFIB in ECG signals focused on traditional bio-medical signal analysis to extract important features for use in statistical classification models. Artificial intelligence models have more recently been used that employ convolutional and/or recurrent network architectures. In this work, significant time and frequency domain characteristics of the ECG signal are extracted by applying the short-time Fourier trans-form and then visually representing the information in a spectrogram. Two different classification approaches were investigated that utilized deep features in the spectrograms construct-ed from ECG segments. The first approach used a pretrained DenseNet model to extract features that were then classified using Support Vector Machines, and the second approach used the spectrograms as direct input into a convolutional network. Both approaches were evaluated against the MIT-BIH AFIB dataset, where the convolutional network approach achieved a classification accuracy of 93.16%. While these results do not surpass established automated atrial fibrillation detection methods, they are promising and warrant further investigation given they did not require any noise prefiltering, hand-crafted features, nor a reliance on beat detection.

PaperPDF

Code

No code repository is listed for this paper in the archive or in Syntology's graph.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Arrhythmia DetectionAtrial Fibrillation DetectionElectrocardiography (ECG)General Classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Atrial Fibrillation Detection MIT-BIH AF Spectrogram + ConvNet Accuracy 93.16% #6 of 6 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

1x1 ConvolutionAverage PoolingBatch NormalizationConcatenated Skip ConnectionConvolutionDense BlockDense ConnectionsDropoutGlobal Average PoolingKaiming InitializationMax PoolingReLUSoftmax

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections