Improved Bat algorithm for the detection of myocardial infarction

The medical practitioners study the electrical activity of the human heart in order to detect heart diseases from the electrocardiogram (ECG) of the heart patients. A myocardial infarction (MI) or heart attack is a heart disease, that occurs when there is a block (blood clot) in the pathway of one or more coronary blood vessels (arteries) that supply blood to the heart muscle. The abnormalities in the heart can be identified by the changes in the ECG signal. The first step in the detection of MI is Preprocessing of ECGs which removes noise by using filters. Feature extraction is the next key process in detecting the changes in the ECG signals. This paper presents a method for extracting key features from each cardiac beat using Improved Bat algorithm. Using this algorithm best features are extracted, then these best (reduced) features are applied to the input of the neural network classifier. It has been observed that the performance of the classifier is improved with the help of the optimized features.