Discriminative Convolutional Sparse Coding of ECG Signals for Automated Recognition of Cardiac Arrhythmias

Electrocardiogram (ECG) is a common and powerful tool for studying heart function and diagnosing several abnormal arrhythmias. In this paper, we present a novel classification model that combines the discriminative convolutional sparse coding (DCSC) framework with the linear support vector machine (LSVM) classification strategy. In the training phase, most existing convolutional sparse coding frameworks are unsupervised in the sense that label information is ignored in the convolutional filter training stage. In this work, we explicitly incorporate a label consistency constraint called “discriminative sparse-code error” into the objective function to learn discriminative dictionary filters for sparse coding. The learned dictionary filters encourage signals from the same class to have similar sparse codes, and signals from different classes to have dissimilar sparse codes. To reduce the computational complexity, we propose to perform a max-pooling operation on the sparse coefficients. Using LSVM as a classifier, we examine the performance of the proposed classification system on the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database in accordance with the AAMI EC57 standard. The experimental results show that the proposed DCSC + LSVM algorithm can obtain 99.32% classification accuracy for cardiac arrhythmia recognition.