A New Neural Network with Adaptive Activation Function for Classification of ECG Arrhythmias

Abstract

This study presents a comparative study of the classification accuracy of ECG signals using a well-known neural network architecture named multilayered perceptron (MLP) with backpropagation training algorithm, and a new neural network with adaptive activation function (AAFNN) for classification of ECG arrhythmias. The ECG signals are taken from MIT-BIH ECG database, which are used to classify ten different arrhythmias for training. These are normal sinus rhythm, sinus bradycardia, ventricular tachycardia, sinus arrhythmia, atrial premature contraction, paced beat, right bundle branch block, left bundle branch block, atrial fibrillation and atrial flutter. For testing, the proposed structures were trained by backpropagation algorithm. Both of them tested using experimental ECG records of 10 patients (7 male and 3 female, average age is 33.8±16.4). The results show that neural network with adaptive activation function is more suitable for biomedical data like as ECG in the classification problems and training speed is much faster than neural network with fixed sigmoid activation function.