Classification of cardiac arrhythmias using fuzzy ARTMAP

The authors have investigated the QRS complex, extracted from electrocardiogram (EGG) data, using fuzzy adaptive resonance theory mapping (ARTMAP) to classify cardiac arrhythmias. Two different conditions have been analyzed: normal and abnormal premature ventricular contraction (PVC). Based on MIT/BIH database annotations, cardiac beats for normal and abnormal QRS complexes were extracted from this database, scaled, and Hamming windowed, after bandpass filtering, to yield a sequence of 100 samples for each QRS segment. From each of these sequences, two linear predictive coding (LPC) coefficients were generated using Burg´s maximum entropy method. The two LPC coefficients, along with the mean-square value of the QRS complex segment, were utilized as features for each condition to train and test a fuzzy ARTMAP neural network for classification of normal and abnormal PVC conditions. The test results show that the fuzzy ARTMAP neural network can classify cardiac arrhythmias with greater than 99% specificity and 97% sensitivity.