Automatic diagnosis of cardiac arrhythmia in electrocardiograms via multigranulation computing

Abstract The automatic and accurate arrhythmia diagnosis in the electrocardiogram (ECG) signals is significant for cardiac health. Typically, the arrhythmia diagnosis is automatically detected depending on single-lead signals or a simple combination of multilead signals from the ECG. However, it ignores the inter-lead correlation and the significance of different leads for different heart beats detection, which decreases the performance of arrhythmia diagnosis. In this paper, arrhythmia diagnosis is converted to a problem of multigranulation computing in the view of granular computing, and thus different lead signals can be captured to improve the effectiveness of abnormal heart beats detection. To this end, multilead ECG signals are firstly granulated into different fuzzy information granules by the fuzzy equivalence relation. An objective decision-making model based on fuzzy set theory is then proposed for describing and analyzing these granulated multilead ECG signals, which brings a self-adaptive and unsupervised decision making. As a result, the significance and correlation of different leads are analyzed by granularity selection and granular structures to make a better decision for arrhythmia diagnosis. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can significantly improve the performance of arrhythmia diagnosis, especially better robustness to several types of cardiac arrhythmia.