Explainable Electrocardiogram Analysis with Wave Decomposition: Application to Myocardial Infarction Detection

Abstract

Automatic analysis of electrocardiograms with adequate explainability is a challenging task. Many deep learning based methods have been proposed for automatic classification of electrocardiograms. However, very few of them provide detailed explainable classification evidence. In our study, we explore explainable ECG classification through explicit decomposition of single-beat (median-beat) ECG signal. In particular, every single-beat ECG sample is decomposed into five subwaves and each subwave is parameterised by a Frequency Modulated Moebius. Those parameters have explicit meanings for ECG interpretation. In stead of solving the optimisation problem iteratively which is timeconsuming, we make use of an Cascaded CNN network to estimate the parameters for each single-beat ECG signal. Our preliminary results show that with appropriate position regularisation strategy, our neural network is able to estimate the subwave for P, Q, R, S, T events and maintain a good reconstruction accuracy (with R2 score 0.94 on test dataset of PTB-XL) in a unsupervised manner. Using the estimated parameters, we achieve very good classification and generalisation performance on myocardial infarction detection on four different datasets. The features of high importance are in accordance with clinical interpretations.