An Approach for Deep Learning in ECG Classification Tasks in the Presence of Noisy Labels.

Abstract

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a serial of diseases with global leading causes of death. Electrocardiogram (ECG) is the most commonly used basis for CVD diagnosis due to its low cost and no injury. Due to the great performance shown in classification tasks with large-scale data sets, deep learning has been widely applied in ECG diagnosis. Manual labeling is a time-consuming and labor-intensive job, which makes it error-prone and easy to labeled wrongly. These noisy labels cause deterioration in performance since deep neural network is easy to over-fitting with noisy labels. However, currently, only limited studies have been concerned with this problem. To alleviate the performance degradation caused by noisy labels, we come up with an optimization method combining data clean and anti-noise loss function. Our method filters the noisy data by data-clean method, followed by training the network with boot-hard loss function. The experiment is carried on MIT-BIH arrhythmia database and we take a 1-D CNN model for test. The result indicates that our optimization method can produce an effective improvement for noisy label problems when the proportion of incorrect labels ranging from 10% to 50%.Clinical Relevance- The proposed algorithm can be potentially applied to deal with the noisy label problem in ECG diagnosis task.