A New 12-Lead ECG Signals Fusion Method Using Evolutionary CNN Trees for Arrhythmia Detection

The 12 leads of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals show the heart activities from different angles of coronal and axial planes; hence, the signals of these 12 leads have functional dependence on each other. This paper proposes a novel method for fusing the data of 12-lead ECG signals to diagnose heart problems. In the first phase of the proposed method, the time-frequency transform is employed to fuse the functional data of leads and extract the frequency data of ECG signals in 12 leads. After that, their dependence is evaluated through the correlation analysis. In the second phase, a structural learning method is adopted to extract the structural data from these 12 leads. Moreover, deep convolutional neural network (CNN) models are coded in this phase through genetic programming. These trees are responsible for learning deep structural features from functional data extracted from 12 leads. These trees are upgraded through the execution of the genetic programming (GP) algorithm to extract the optimal features. These two phases are used together to fuse the leads of ECG signals to diagnose various heart problems. According to the test results on ChapmanECG, including the signals of 10,646 patients, the proposed method enjoys the mean accuracy of 97.60% in the diagnosis of various types of arrhythmias in the Chapman dataset. It also outperformed the state-of-the-art methods.