Abstract
Atrial fibrillation (AF) is one of the clinic's most common arrhythmias with high morbidity and mortality. Developing an intelligent auxiliary diagnostic model of AF based on a body surface electrocardiogram (ECG) is necessary. Convolutional neural network (CNN) is one of the most commonly used models for AF recognition. However, typical CNN is not compatible with variable-duration ECG, so it is hard to demonstrate its universality and generalization in practical applications. Hence, this paper proposes a novel Time-adaptive densely network named MP-DLNet-F. The MP-DLNet module solves the problem of incompatibility between variable-duration ECG and 1D-CNN. In addition, the feature enhancement module and data imbalance processing module are respectively used to enhance the perception of temporal-quality information and decrease the sensitivity to data imbalance. The experimental results indicate that the proposed MP-DLNet-F achieved 87.98% classification accuracy, and F1-score of 0.847 on the CinC2017 database for 10-second cropped/padded single-lead ECG fragments. Furthermore, we deploy transfer learning techniques to test heterogeneous datasets, and in the CPSC2018 12-lead dataset, the method improved the average accuracy and F1-score by 21.81% and 16.14%, respectively. Experimental results indicate that our method can update the constructed model's parameters and precisely forecast AF with different duration distributions and lead distributions. Combining these advantages, MP-DLNet-F can exemplify all kinds of varied-duration or imbalance medical signal processing problems such as Electroencephalogram (EEG) and Photoplethysmography (PPG).