Heart failure classification using deep learning to extract spatiotemporal features from ECG

Abstract Background Heart failure is a syndrome with complex clinical manifestations. Due to increasing population aging, heart failure has become a major medical problem worldwide. In this study, we used the MIMIC-III public database to extract the temporal and spatial characteristics of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals from patients with heart failure. Methods We developed a NYHA functional classification model for heart failure based on a deep learning method. We introduced an integrating attention mechanism based on the CNN-LSTM-SE model, segmenting the ECG signal into 2 to 20 s long segments. Ablation experiments showed that the 12 s ECG signal segments could be used with the proposed deep learning model for superior classification of heart failure. Results The accuracy, positive predictive value, sensitivity, and specificity of the NYHA functional classification method were 99.09, 98.9855, 99.033, and 99.649%, respectively. Conclusions The comprehensive performance of this model exceeds similar methods and can be used to assist in clinical medical diagnoses.