Short Term ECG Classification with Residual-Concatenate Network and Metric Learning

ECG classification is important to the diagnosis of cardiovascular disease. This paper develops a robust and accurate algorithm for automatic detection of heart arrhythmias from ECG signals recorded with one lead. A novel model based on the convolutional neural network is proposed to extract low-level and high-level features of short term ECG. In addition, Information-Theoretic Metric Learning is utilized as a final classification model to boost the discrimination abilities of the network trained features. The experimental results over the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database show that the model achieves a comparable performance with most of the state-of-the-art methods and Information-Theoretic Metric Learning further improves the performance. Besides the good accuracy achieved, the proposed method balances different criteria.