Optimization of End-to-End Convolutional Neural Networks for Analysis of Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest Rhythms during Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation

High performance of the shock advisory analysis of the electrocardiogram (ECG) during cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) is important for better management of the resuscitation protocol. It should provide fewer interruptions of chest compressions (CC) for non-shockable organized rhythms (OR) and Asystole, or prompt CC stopping for early treatment of shockable ventricular fibrillation (VF). Major disturbing factors are strong CC artifacts corrupting raw ECG, which we aimed to analyze with optimized end-to-end convolutional neural network (CNN) without pre-filtering or additional sensors. The hyperparameter random search of 1500 CNN models with 2–7 convolutional layers, 5–50 filters and 5–100 kernel sizes was done on large databases from independent OHCA interventions for training (3001 samples) and validation (2528 samples). The best model, named CNN3-CC-ECG network with three convolutional layers (filters@kernels: 5@5,25@20,50@20) presented Sensitivity Se(VF) = 89%(268/301), Specificity Sp(OR) = 91.7%(1504/1640), Sp(Asystole) = 91.1%(3325/3650) on an independent test OHCA database. CNN3-CC-ECG’s ability to effectively extract features from raw ECG signals during CPR was comprehensively demonstrated, and the dependency on the CPR corruption level in ECG was tested. We denoted a significant drop of Se(VF) = 74.2% and Sp(OR) = 84.6% in very strong CPR artifacts with a signal-to-noise ratio of SNR < −9 dB, p < 0.05. Otherwise, for strong, moderate and weak CC artifacts (SNR > −9 dB, −6 dB, −3 dB), we observed insignificant performance differences: Se(VF) = 92.5–96.3%, Sp(OR) = 93.4–95.5%, Sp(Asystole) = 92.6–94.0%, p > 0.05. Performance stability with respect to CC rate was validated. Generalizable application of the optimized computationally efficient CNN model was justified by an independent OHCA database, which to our knowledge is the largest test dataset with real-life cardiac arrest rhythms during CPR.