Analysis of 12-lead ECGs for SARS-CoV-2 detection using deep learning techniques

Abstract

AbstractThe spread of the COVID-19 pandemic is expected to be uncontrollable by 2020. The main precautions to avoid virus spread have been the introduction of surgical masks or FFP2, sanitization of the hands, and maintaining social distancing. Due to their reliability, molecular tampons are the main detection and prevention methods known as the “Gold Standard”. However, these methods can be particularly uncomfortable. In this case, the analysis of electrocardiogram traces appears to be an alternative method for detecting COVID-19. The dataset used is made up of 1937 images from a study conducted in Pakistan that were preprocessed to train six different neural networks, including MobileNetV2, ResNet-18, ResNet-50, AlexNet, SqueezeNet, and an ad hoc defined neural network. The results show high classification performance, with an accuracy close to 98.94%, as reached by the Resnet-18 network. Moreover, significant attention was devoted to analyzing confusion matrices, revealing the capacity of the networks to identify distinctive features indicative of COVID-19 within ECG data. Finally, it is suggested that in nearly all experiments, including those with low performance, COVID-19 patients are correctly classified, further enhancing the diagnostic potential of ECGs data and DL approach.