AUTAN-ECG: An AUToencoder bAsed system for anomaly detectioN in ECG signals

Abstract

<p>Electrocardiographic (ECG) signals that monitor heart activity can help identifying disease-related anomalies. Reliable automatic anomaly detection has been shown to be useful in supporting physicians in reading ECG signals. Decision support systems may be useful in such cases but their reliability can be guaranteed. </p> <p>Autoencoders (AEs) have been extensively used to analyse signals in many fields. Convolutional Autoencoders (CAE) are a particular class of AE showing optimal performances in detecting signal anomalies. Thus, CAEs can be used to support and automatise the task of anomaly detection. We design and use a CAE-based system to detect anomalies in ECG signals to support cardiologists in identifying anomalies related to possible diseases. Our tool outperforms other state-of-the-art ECG anomaly detection approaches tested on a real dataset. In the task of anomaly detection, our CAE obtains a ROC AUC of 97.82% with a simulated test set and a ROC AUC of 99.75% using on a real test set. The tool and the source code are available at <a href="https://github.com/UgoLomoio/ECG_DSS_CAE" target="_blank">https://github.com/UgoLomoio/EG_DSS_CAE</a>.</p>