Deep VMD-attention network for arrhythmia signal classification based on Hodgkin-Huxley model and multi-objective crayfish optimization algorithm

Recent research for arrhythmia classification is increasingly based on AI-driven approaches, which are primarily grounded in ECG data, but often neglect the mathematical foundations of cardiac electrophysiology. A finite element model (FEM) of the human heart, grounded in the Hodgkin-Huxley (HH) model was established to simulate cardiac electrophysiology, and ECG signals from 200 representative points were acquired. Two types of arrhythmia characterized by significant anomalies in the variables of the HH model were simulated, and corresponding synthetic ECG signals were generated. A multi-objective optimization method based on non-dominated sorting was integrated into the crayfish optimization algorithm (MOCOA). To optimize the key parameters K and α in variational mode decomposition (VMD), a MOCOA-VMD technique specifically tailored for ECG signal processing was developed. The Pareto optimal front was generated using MOCOA with the indicators of spectral kurtosis and KL divergence, by which the optimal intrinsic mode functions were obtained. A deep VMD-attention network based on MOCOA was developed for ECG signal classification. The ablation study evaluated the effectiveness of the proposed signal decomposition method and deep attention modules. The model based on MOCOA-VMD achieves the highest accuracy of 94.46%, outperforming models constructed using EEMD, VMD, CNN and LSTM modules. Bayesian optimization was employed to fine-tune the hyperparameters and further enhance the performance of the deep model, with the best accuracy of the deep attention model after TPE optimization reaching 96.11%. Moreover, the real-world MIT-BIH arrhythmia database was utilized for further validation to prove the robustness and generalizability of the proposed model. The proposed deep VMD-attention modeling and classification strategy has shown significant promise and may offer valuable inspiration for other signal processing fields as well.