Deep conv-attention model for diagnosing left bundle branch block from 12-lead electrocardiograms
This addresses the need for reliable LBBB detection in medical settings to enhance treatment outcomes, though it is incremental as it applies deep learning to an existing diagnostic challenge.
The study tackled the problem of accurately diagnosing left bundle branch block (LBBB) arrhythmia from 12-lead electrocardiograms to improve cardiac resynchronization therapy decisions, achieving results such as 98.80% accuracy and 0.875 AUC.
Cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) is a treatment that is used to compensate for irregularities in the heartbeat. Studies have shown that this treatment is more effective in heart patients with left bundle branch block (LBBB) arrhythmia. Therefore, identifying this arrhythmia is an important initial step in determining whether or not to use CRT. On the other hand, traditional methods for detecting LBBB on electrocardiograms (ECG) are often associated with errors. Thus, there is a need for an accurate method to diagnose this arrhythmia from ECG data. Machine learning, as a new field of study, has helped to increase human systems' performance. Deep learning, as a newer subfield of machine learning, has more power to analyze data and increase systems accuracy. This study presents a deep learning model for the detection of LBBB arrhythmia from 12-lead ECG data. This model consists of 1D dilated convolutional layers. Attention mechanism has also been used to identify important input data features and classify inputs more accurately. The proposed model is trained and validated on a database containing 10344 12-lead ECG samples using the 10-fold cross-validation method. The final results obtained by the model on the 12-lead ECG data are as follows. Accuracy: 98.80+-0.08%, specificity: 99.33+-0.11 %, F1 score: 73.97+-1.8%, and area under the receiver operating characteristics curve (AUC): 0.875+-0.0192. These results indicate that the proposed model in this study can effectively diagnose LBBB with good efficiency and, if used in medical centers, will greatly help diagnose this arrhythmia and early treatment.