Extracting cardiac dynamics within ECG signal for human identification and cardiovascular diseases classification

Abstract

Cardiac characteristics underlying the time/frequency domain features are limited and not comprehensive enough to reflect the temporal/dynamical nature of ECG patterns. This paper proposes a dynamical ECG recognition framework for human identification and cardiovascular diseases classification via a dynamical neural learning mechanism. The proposed method consists of two phases: a training phase and a test phase. In the training phase, cardiac dynamics within ECG signals is extracted (approximated) accurately by using radial basis function (RBF) neural networks through deterministic learning mechanism. The obtained cardiac system dynamics is represented and stored in constant RBF networks. An ECG signature is then derived from the extracted cardiac dynamics along the periodic ECG state trajectories. A bank of estimators is constructed using the extracted cardiac dynamics to represent the trained gait patterns. In the test phase, recognition errors are generated and taken as the similarity measure by comparing the cardiac dynamics of the trained ECG patterns and the dynamics of the test ECG pattern. Rapid recognition of a test ECG pattern begins with measuring the state of test pattern, and automatically proceeds with the evolution of the recognition error system. According to the smallest error principle, the test ECG pattern can be rapidly recognized. This kind of cardiac dynamics information represents the beat-to-beat temporal change of ECG modifications and the temporal/dynamical nature of ECG patterns. Therefore, the amount of discriminability provided by the cardiac dynamics is larger than the original signals. This paper further discusses the extension of the proposed method for cardiovascular diseases classification. The constructed recognition system can distinguish and assign dynamical ECG patterns to predefined classes according to the similarity of cardiac dynamics. Experiments are carried out on the FuWai and PTB ECG databases to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.