Attention-based 3D CNN with residual connections for efficient ECG-based COVID-19 detection

• Published in: Computers in biology and medicine Vol. 143; p. 105335
• Main Authors: Sobahi, Nebras, Sengur, Abdulkadir, Tan, Ru-San, Acharya, U. Rajendra
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Elsevier Ltd 01.04.2022; Elsevier Limited
• Subjects: 3D CNN; Accuracy; Artificial intelligence; Artificial neural networks; Attention mechanism; Cardiac arrhythmia; Classification; Computed tomography; Coronaviruses; COVID-19; COVID-19 detection; Datasets; Deep learning; ECG; EKG; Electrocardiography; Gradient flow; Heart attacks; Internal Medicine; Machine learning; Medical imaging; Neural networks; Other; Pandemics; Residual connections; Support vector machines; X-rays; 3D CNN; ECG; Attention mechanism; COVID-19 detection; Residual connections
• ISSN: 0010-4825; 1879-0534; 1879-0534
• DOI: 10.1016/j.compbiomed.2022.105335

The world has been suffering from the COVID-19 pandemic since 2019. More than 5 million people have died. Pneumonia is caused by the COVID-19 virus, which can be diagnosed using chest X-ray and computed tomography (CT) scans. COVID-19 also causes clinical and subclinical cardiovascular injury that may be detected on electrocardiography (ECG), which is easily accessible. For ECG-based COVID-19 detection, we developed a novel attention-based 3D convolutional neural network (CNN) model with residual connections (RC). In this paper, the deep learning (DL) approach was developed using 12-lead ECG printouts obtained from 250 normal subjects, 250 patients with COVID-19 and 250 with abnormal heartbeat. For binary classification, the COVID-19 and normal classes were considered; and for multiclass classification, all classes. The ECGs were preprocessed into standard ECG lead segments that were channeled into 12-dimensional volumes as input to the network model. Our developed model comprised of 19 layers with three 3D convolutional, three batch normalization, three rectified linear unit, two dropouts, two additional (for residual connections), one attention, and one fully connected layer. The RC were used to improve gradient flow through the developed network, and attention layer, to connect the second residual connection to the fully connected layer through the batch normalization layer. A publicly available dataset was used in this work. We obtained average accuracies of 99.0% and 92.0% for binary and multiclass classifications, respectively, using ten-fold cross-validation. Our proposed model is ready to be tested with a huge ECG database. •Automated classification of abnormal heartbeat, Covid-19 and normal groups using 12-lead ECG signals.•3D CNN model comprising of attention mechanism and residual connections is employed.•Variational autoencoder is used for data augmentation.•Obtained average accuracies of 99.0% for binary classification and 92.0% for multiclass classifications.