Reduced-Lead ECG Classifier Model Trained with DivideMix and Model Ensemble
This work addresses noisy label problems in ECG classification for medical diagnostics, but it is incremental as it combines existing techniques like DivideMix and SWA without introducing a fundamentally new approach.
The paper tackled the challenge of automatically diagnosing cardiac abnormalities from reduced-lead ECG data, which suffers from noisy labels due to inconsistencies with standard 12-lead annotations, by proposing DNN-based classifiers that incorporate DivideMix and stochastic weight averaging, achieving scores like 0.49 on a hidden test set and ranking 9th out of 39 teams.
Automatic diagnosis of multiple cardiac abnormalities from reduced-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) data is challenging. One of the reasons for this is the difficulty of defining labels from standard 12-lead data. Reduced-lead ECG data usually do not have identical characteristics of cardiac abnormalities because of the noisy label problem. Thus, there is an inconsistency in the annotated labels between the reduced-lead and 12-lead ECG data. To solve this, we propose deep neural network (DNN)-based ECG classifier models that incorporate DivideMix and stochastic weight averaging (SWA). DivideMix was used to refine the noisy label by using two separate models. Besides DivideMix, we used a model ensemble technique, SWA, which also focuses on the noisy label problem, to enhance the effect of the models generated by DivideMix. Our classifiers (ami_kagoshima) received scores of 0.49, 0.47, 0.48, 0.47, and 0.47 (ranked 9th, 10th, 10th, 11th, and 10th, respectively, out of 39 teams) for the 12-lead, 6-lead, 4-lead, 3-lead, and 2-lead versions, respectively, of the hidden test set with the challenge evaluation metric. We obtained the scores of 0.701, 0.686, 0.693, 0.693, and 0.685 on the 10-fold cross validation, and 0.623, 0.593, 0.606, 0.612, and 0.601 on the hidden validation set for each lead combination.