Hybrid Bacterial Foraging and Particle Swarm Optimization for detecting Bundle Branch Block

Abnormal cardiac beat identification is a key process in the detection of heart diseases. Our present study describes a procedure for the detection of left and right bundle branch block (LBBB and RBBB) Electrocardiogram (ECG) patterns. The electrical impulses that control the cardiac beat face difficulty in moving inside the heart. This problem is termed as bundle branch block (BBB). BBB makes it harder for the heart to pump blood effectively through the heart circulatory system. ECG feature extraction is a key process in detecting heart ailments. Our present study comes up with a hybrid method combining two heuristic optimization methods: Bacterial Forging Optimization (BFO) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) for the feature selection of ECG signals. One of the major controlling forces of BFO algorithm is the chemotactic movement of a bacterium that models a test solution. The chemotaxis process of the BFO depends on random search directions which may lead to a delay in achieving the global optimum solution. The hybrid technique: Bacterial Forging–Particle Swarm Optimization (BFPSO) incorporates the concepts from BFO and PSO and it creates individuals in a new generation. This BFPSO method performs local search through the chemotactic movement of BFO and the global search over the entire search domain is accomplished by a PSO operator. The BFPSO feature values are given as the input for the Levenberg–Marquardt Neural Network classifier.