Open-world electrocardiogram classification via domain knowledge-driven contrastive learning

Shuang Zhou, Xiao Huang, Ninghao Liu, Wen Zhang, Yuan Ting Zhang, Fu Lai Chung

Research output: Journal article publicationJournal articleAcademic researchpeer-review

Abstract

Automatic electrocardiogram (ECG) classification provides valuable auxiliary information for assisting disease diagnosis and has received much attention in research. The success of existing classification models relies on fitting the labeled samples for every ECG type. However, in practice, well-annotated ECG datasets usually cover only limited ECG types. It thus raises an issue: conventional classification models trained with limited ECG types can only identify those ECG types that have already been observed in the training set, but fail to recognize unseen (or unknown) ECG types that exist in the wild and are not included in training data. In this work, we investigate an important problem called open-world ECG classification that can predict fine-grained observed ECG classes and identify unseen classes. Accordingly, we propose a customized method that first incorporates clinical knowledge into contrastive learning by generating “hard negative” samples to guide learning diagnostic ECG features (i.e., distinguishable representations), and then performs multi-hypersphere learning to learn compact ECG representations for classification. The experiment results on 12-lead ECG datasets (CPSC2018, PTB-XL, and Georgia) demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, our method achieves superior accuracy than the comparative methods on the unseen ECG class and certain seen classes. Overall, the investigated problem (i.e., open-world ECG classification) helps to draw attention to the reliability of automatic ECG diagnosis, and the proposed method is proven effective in tackling the challenges. The code and datasets are released at https://github.com/betterzhou/Open_World_ECG_Classification.

Original languageEnglish
Article number106551
Pages (from-to)1-16
JournalNeural Networks
Volume179
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Nov 2024

Keywords

  • Contrastive learning
  • Deep learning
  • Domain knowledge
  • ECG classification
  • Open-world learning

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Artificial Intelligence

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Open-world electrocardiogram classification via domain knowledge-driven contrastive learning'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this