Learning post-processing for QRS detection using Recurrent Neural Network
This work addresses the need for automated, dataset-agnostic post-processing in ECG analysis, though it is incremental as it adapts existing deep-learning techniques to a specific domain bottleneck.
The study tackled the problem of manually setting post-processing thresholds in deep-learning-based QRS detection by proposing a GRU-based method to learn these thresholds, resulting in performance that marginally follows domain-specific manual post-processing without requiring explicit parameter tuning.
Deep-learning based QRS-detection algorithms often require essential post-processing to refine the prediction streams for R-peak localisation. The post-processing performs signal-processing tasks from as simple as, removing isolated 0s or 1s in the prediction-stream to sophisticated steps, which require domain-specific knowledge, including the minimum threshold of a QRS-complex extent or R-R interval. Often these thresholds vary among QRS-detection studies and are empirically determined for the target dataset, which may have implications if the target dataset differs. Moreover, these studies, in general, fail to identify the relative strengths of deep-learning models and post-processing to weigh them appropriately. This study classifies post-processing, as found in the QRS-detection literature, into two levels - moderate, and advanced - and advocates that the thresholds be learned by an appropriate deep-learning module, called a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), to avoid explicitly setting post-processing thresholds. This is done by utilising the same philosophy of shifting from hand-crafted feature-engineering to deep-learning-based feature-extraction. The results suggest that GRU learns the post-processing level and the QRS detection performance using GRU-based post-processing marginally follows the domain-specific manual post-processing, without requiring usage of domain-specific threshold parameters. To the best of our knowledge, the use of GRU to learn QRS-detection post-processing from CNN model generated prediction streams is the first of its kind. The outcome was used to recommend a modular design for a QRS-detection system, where the level of complexity of the CNN model and post-processing can be tuned based on the deployment environment.