A comparative analysis of CNNs and LSTMs for ECG-based diagnosis of arrythmia and congestive heart failure

Cardiac arrhythmias are major global health concern and their early detection is critical for diagnosis. This study comprehensively evaluates the effectiveness of CNNs and LSTMs for the classification of cardiac arrhythmias, considering three PhysioNet datasets. ECG records are segmented to accommodate around ∼10s of ECG data. Followed by transformation to scalograms using DWT for training VGG-16; and WTS for feature extraction and dimensionality reduction for training LSTM network. VGG-16 achieved 96.44% test accuracy while LSTM achieved 92%. Results also highlight the effectiveness of VGG-16 for short-duration ECG analysis, while LSTM excels in long-term monitoring on edge devices for personalized healthcare.