Inter-Patient Congestive Heart Failure Detection Using ECG-Convolution-Vision Transformer Network

An attack of congestive heart failure (CHF) can cause symptoms such as difficulty breathing, dizziness, or fatigue, which can be life-threatening in severe cases. An electrocardiogram (ECG) is a simple and economical method for diagnosing CHF. Due to the inherent complexity of ECGs and the subtle differences in the ECG waveform, misdiagnosis happens often. At present, the research on automatic CHF detection methods based on machine learning has become a research hotspot. However, the existing research focuses on an intra-patient experimental scheme and lacks the performance evaluation of working under noise, which cannot meet the application requirements. To solve the above issues, we propose a novel method to identify CHF using the ECG-Convolution-Vision Transformer Network (ECVT-Net). The algorithm combines the characteristics of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and a Vision Transformer, which can automatically extract high-dimensional abstract features of ECGs with simple pre-processing. In this study, the model reached an accuracy of 98.88% for the inter-patient scheme. Furthermore, we added different degrees of noise to the original ECGs to verify the model’s noise robustness. The model’s performance in the above experiments proved that it could effectively identify CHF ECGs and can work under certain noise.