Transfer learning applied to a deep learning system for cardiac abnormality classification in electrocardiograms

Abstract: Cardiovascular diseases are a leading cause of death globally. Early diagnosis and treatment is of prime importance to prevent or mitigate health complications. Electrocardiogram (ECG) is a standard test modality used for early diagnosis of arrhythmias. The standard ECG uses 12 leads (i.e., 12 different views of the electrical activity of the heart). However, it is not always possible to perform a standard 12-lead ECG, for instance, in certain emergency situations. Such devices used in emergency situations are able to measure only a subset of leads. Although it is a simpler way of recording ECG, it comes at the cost of losing some information. The project presented in this thesis applies three different models based on canonical correlation analysis (CCA) to perform transfer learning from 12-lead ECGs to improve performance when only a subset of leads is available. The models used were linear canonical correlation analysis, deep canonical correlation analysis (DCCA) and deep canonically correlated bidirectional long short-term memory networks (DCC-BiLSTMs). These models are compared to each other using different configurations to study their performance on ECG data. Linear canonical correlation analysis performed better than its more complex variants, DCCA and DCC-BiLSTMs. With this method, it was possible to improve performance on ECG classification when using two, three, four and six leads in a computationally efficient way.