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Top1. Introduction
The electrocardiogram (ECG) is a non-invasive technique that is most widely used as a primary diagnostic tool for detecting cardiovascular diseases. The ECG is an electrical signal that reflects the electrical activity passing through the heart muscle, measured by placing electrodes at the body surface. It is characterized by five peaks and valleys, labelled by successive letters of the alphabet P, Q, R, S and T. The P wave represents the excitation of the atria or the upper chambers of the heart, while the QRS wave (or complex) and T wave represent the excitation of the ventricles or the lower chambers of the heart. Figure 1 shows the schematic record of the normal heartbeat. Any deviation from the norm in a particular ECG measurement – manifesting itself in a form of an irregular heartbeat pattern, also known as cardiac arrhythmia – might be an indication of possibly serious cardiac issue or abnormality. Timely detection and identification of cardiac arrhythmias may help save patients’ lives and enhance their quality of living through more effective treatment.
Figure 1. A typical ECG signal with P, Q, R, S and T marked
Up to now, a number of methods for automatic arrhythmia classification in the ECG signals have been previously reported in the literature (Luz, Schwartz, Cámara-Chávez, & Menotti, 2016). These mainly focus on linear discriminant analysis (Sharma & Singh, 2014), artificial neural networks (Ebrahimzadeh, Ahmadi, & Safarnejad, 2016; Sarkaleh & Shahbahrami, 2012), support vector machines (Khazaee & Zadeh, 2014), mixture-of-experts algorithms (Übeyli, 2008) and statistical Markov models (Liang, Zhang, Tan, & Li, 2014). The most difficult problem faced during automated ECG classification is that there is a great variety of morphologies among the heartbeats belonging to one class, even for the same patient (Osowski & Linh, 2002). Moreover, heartbeats belonging to different classes can be morphologically similar to each other. Therefore, an effective feature extraction technique is needed to produce such representation of the original ECG signal that will suppress the differences among the ECG waveforms of the same class and, at the same time, emphasize the differences for the waveforms belonging to different types of arrhythmias. Various features have been used by other researchers to characterize arrhythmias including: morphological features and heartbeat time intervals (de Chazal & Reilly, 2006), statistical and mixture modelling features (Afkhami, Azarnia, & Tinati, 2016), temporal features (Syama Uday, Mohanalin, & Devi, 2016), frequency domain features (Gothwal, Kedawat, & Kumar, 2011; Ganesh Kumar & Kumaraswamy, 2014), hybrid features (Muthuvel, Suresh, Alexander, & Veni, 2014), Hermite polynomials (Ebrahimzadeh, Ahmadi, & Safarnejad, 2016) and wavelet transform coefficients (Sarkaleh & Shahbahrami, 2012).