Cardiac Arrhythmia Diagnosis with an Intelligent Algorithm using Chaos Features of Electrocardiogram Signal and Compound Classifier

Cardiac Arrhythmias are known as one of the most dangerous cardiac diseases. Applying intelligent algorithms in this area, leads into the reduction of the ECG signal processing time by the physician as well as reducing the probable mistakes caused by fatigue of the specialist. The purpose of this study is to introduce an intelligent algorithm for the separation of three cardiac arrhythmias by using chaos features of ECG signal and combining three types of the most common classifiers in these signal’s processing area. First, ECG signals related to three cardiac arrhythmias of Atrial Fibrillation, Ventricular Tachycardia and Post Supra Ventricular Tachycardia along with the normal cardiac signal from the arrhythmia database of MIT-BIH were gathered. Then, chaos features describing non-linear dynamic of ECG signal were extracted by calculating the Lyapunov exponent values and signal’s fractal dimension. finally, the compound classifier was used by combining of multilayer perceptron neural network, support vector machine network and K-Nearest Neighbor. Obtained results were compared to the classifying method based on features of time-domain and time-frequency domain, as a proof for the efficacy of the chaos features of the ECG signal. Likewise, to evaluate the efficacy of the compound classifier, each network was used both as separately and also as combined and the results were compared. The obtained results showed that Using the chaos features of ECG signal and the compound classifier, can classify cardiac arrhythmias with 99.1% ± 0.2 accuracy and 99.6% ± 0.1 sensitivity and specificity rate of 99.3 % ± 0.1