Phase-domain Deep Patient-ECG Image Learning for Zero-effort Smart Health Security.

Abstract

Smart health is quickly boosted by technological advancements: smart sensors, body sensor network, internet of medical things and big data. Vast amounts of smart health big data from ubiquitous sensors pose unprecedented challenges to the security and privacy protection, which is extremely critical in healthcare applications. The vital signs, user daily behaviors, medicine recommendations, and so many other health data are vulnerable to different attacks, due to the fact that wearable/mobile monitors have very strict performance/power constraints, which limit the complexity of security protocols. In this paper, we study how to leverage a natural vital signal (Electrocardiogram - ECG) for user identification purpose, without introducing new hardware sensing devices. ECG is not only a gold standard cardiac signal, but also unique to each individual. We investigate a phase-domain deep patient-ECG image learning framework, to tackle key challenges in ECG biometric user identification: high diversities of ECG morphologies due to heart diseases, and time-consuming/ineffective heartbeat localization methods & manual feature engineering. The ultimate goal is to make the smart health security zero-effort: use `phase-domain transformation' to enable blind signal segmentation without localizing heartbeats; create a computer image processing-like task by `pixelating' phase-domain ECG trajectories to ECG images; and enable automatic (non-manual) `deep feature learning' using a deep convolutional neural network. Evaluated on two patient-ECG databases, this zero-effort framework achieves an accuracy as high as 97.2%, and greatly outperforms state-of-the-art studies in terms of the generalization ability and/or performance. This study is expected to enable highly challenging patient-ECG biometric user identification, by generalizable blind signal segmentation and deep feature learning strategies, in the era of smart health boosted by internet of medical things and big medical data.