Shany Biton

Shany Biton, Mohsin Aldhafeeri, Erez Marcusohn et al.

To drive health innovation that meets the needs of all and democratize healthcare, there is a need to assess the generalization performance of deep learning (DL) algorithms across various distribution shifts to ensure that these algorithms are robust. This retrospective study is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to develop and assess the generalization performance of a deep learning (DL) model for AF events detection from long term beat-to-beat intervals across ethnicities, ages and sexes. The new recurrent DL model, denoted ArNet2, was developed on a large retrospective dataset of 2,147 patients totaling 51,386 hours of continuous electrocardiogram (ECG). The models generalization was evaluated on manually annotated test sets from four centers (USA, Israel, Japan and China) totaling 402 patients. The model was further validated on a retrospective dataset of 1,730 consecutives Holter recordings from the Rambam Hospital Holter clinic, Haifa, Israel. The model outperformed benchmark state-of-the-art models and generalized well across ethnicities, ages and sexes. Performance was higher for female than male and young adults (less than 60 years old) and showed some differences across ethnicities. The main finding explaining these variations was an impairment in performance in groups with a higher prevalence of atrial flutter (AFL). Our findings on the relative performance of ArNet2 across groups may have clinical implications on the choice of the preferred AF examination method to use relative to the group of interest.

Noam Ben-Moshe, Kenta Tsutsui, Shany Biton et al.

Introduction: Deep learning models for detecting episodes of atrial fibrillation (AF) using rhythm information in long-term, ambulatory ECG recordings have shown high performance. However, the rhythm-based approach does not take advantage of the morphological information conveyed by the different ECG waveforms, particularly the f-waves. As a result, the performance of such models may be inherently limited. Methods: To address this limitation, we have developed a deep learning model, named RawECGNet, to detect episodes of AF and atrial flutter (AFl) using the raw, single-lead ECG. We compare the generalization performance of RawECGNet on two external data sets that account for distribution shifts in geography, ethnicity, and lead position. RawECGNet is further benchmarked against a state-of-the-art deep learning model, named ArNet2, which utilizes rhythm information as input. Results: Using RawECGNet, the results for the different leads in the external test sets in terms of the F1 score were 0.91--0.94 in RBDB and 0.93 in SHDB, compared to 0.89--0.91 in RBDB and 0.91 in SHDB for ArNet2. The results highlight RawECGNet as a high-performance, generalizable algorithm for detection of AF and AFl episodes, exploiting information on both rhythm and morphology.