Atrial Fibrillation (AF) is a common cardiac arrhythmia. Many AF patients experience complications such as stroke and other cardiovascular issues. Early detection of AF is crucial. The great majority of algorithms can only distinguish “AF rhythm in AF patients” from “sinus rhythm in healthy individuals” . However, AF patients do not always exhibit AF rhythm, most of the time they present with sinus rhythms, and there is also a potential risk of AF in sinus rhythms. How to detect AF from sinus rhythm is a challenge. To address this, this paper proposes a novel artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm to distinguish “sinus rhythm in AF patients” and “sinus rhythm in healthy individuals” in beat-level. We cut 1 s of sinus beats from single-lead Electrocardiogram (ECG) data and fed them to the Net1d model, a deep learning model that processes one-dimensional data, to obtain the risk probability of each beat. Besides, we have also introduced the beat-level risk interpreters, trend risk interpreters, addressing the interpretability issues of deep learning models and the difficulty in explaining AF risk trends. Additionally, the beat-level information fusion decision is presented to enhance model accuracy. The experimental results demonstrate that the average AUC for single beats used as testing data from CPSC 2021 dataset is 0.7314, with an average accuracy of 0.6606 and an F1 score of 0.6470. By employing 150 beats for information fusion decision algorithm, the average AUC can reach 0.7591, while the average accuracy and F1 score improve to 0.6887 and 0.6749. Compared to previous segment-level algorithms, we utilized beats as input, reducing data dimensionality and making the model more lightweight, facilitating deployment on portable medical devices. Furthermore, we draw new and interesting findings through average beat analysis and subgroup analysis, considering varying risk levels. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/leijsen/ECGBeat4AFSinus.
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