A novel methodology of cardiac arrhythmia classification based on ECG and context-dependent HMM

Abstract

This paper presents a novel diagnosis method for the classification of cardiac arrhythmia based on electrocardiogram (ECG). The recognition of abnormal heart beat was performed using the context-independent hidden Markov model (HMM) and context-dependent HMM. Gaussian mixture model (GMM) was used as the state emission probability density function. The input feature of the recognition system was the raw heartbeat waveform. There were no other feature transform steps. Six classes of heartbeats, including normal beat, paced beat, left bundle branch block beat, right bundle branch block beat, premature ventricular contraction, and ventricular escape beat, were categorized by the system. The performance was evaluated on the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database and the European ST-T Database. The experimental results showed that the context-dependent HMM was more precise than the context-independent HMM. The context-dependent HMM system achieved a mean level of 95.26%, 90.67% and 95.60% in heart beats recognition accuracy, sensibility and specificity respectively. The results confirmed the importance of the generative model and the raw waveform feature strategy in ECG study.