Neural networks and SVM for heartbeat classification

The diagnosis of cardiac dysfunctions requires the analysis of long-term ECG signal recordings, often containing hundreds to thousands of heartbeats. The purpose of this work is to propose a diagnostic system for modelling and classification of heartbeat, by use of time features and Support vector machines (SVM) classification algorithm. Neural Networks learning allow us to select a features of each heart beat on the basis of Generalized Orthogonal Forward Regression (GOFR) algorithm and a library of 132 Gaussians with different standard deviations and different means, each beat is represented by five Gaussians with different amplitudes. The parameters of this system are determined and its performance is evaluated for the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database. For a database of 364 normal heartbeats and 1148 abnormal heartbeats, we apply the SVM algorithm with Radial Basis Function kernel. Our results demonstrate that the testing performance of the neural network and SVM diagnostic system is found to be very satisfactory with a recognition rate of 99.67%.