Finding "Good Views" of Electrocardiogram Signals for Inferring Abnormalities in Cardiac Condition
This work addresses a specific bottleneck in ECG analysis for medical diagnosis, but it is incremental as it builds on existing contrastive learning methods.
The paper tackled the problem of defining positive samples for contrastive learning in ECG-based arrhythmia detection, finding that learned representations invariant to patient identity yielded the best performance in downstream classification tasks.
Electrocardiograms (ECGs) are an established technique to screen for abnormal cardiac signals. Recent work has established that it is possible to detect arrhythmia directly from the ECG signal using deep learning algorithms. While a few prior approaches with contrastive learning have been successful, the best way to define a positive sample remains an open question. In this project, we investigate several ways to define positive samples, and assess which approach yields the best performance in a downstream task of classifying arrhythmia. We explore spatiotemporal invariances, generic augmentations, demographic similarities, cardiac rhythms, and wave attributes of ECG as potential ways to match positive samples. We then evaluate each strategy with downstream task performance, and find that learned representations invariant to patient identity are powerful in arrhythmia detection. We made our code available in: https://github.com/mandiehyewon/goodviews_ecg.git