A Real-time Arrhythmia Heartbeats Classification Algorithm using Parallel Delta Modulations and Rotated Linear-Kernel Support Vector Machines

Real-time wearable electrocardiogram(ECG) monitoring sensor is one of the best candidates in assisting cardiovascular disease(CVD) diagnosis. In this paper, we present a novel real-time machine learning system for Arrhythmia classification. The system is based on the parallel Delta modulation and QRS/PT wave detection algorithms. We propose a patient dependent rotated linear-kernel support vector machine (SVM) classifier that combines the global and local classifiers, with three types of feature vectors extracted directly from the Delta modulated bit-streams. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated using the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database. According to the AAMI standard, two binary classifications are performed and evaluated, which are supraventricular ectopic beat(SVEB) versus the rest four classes, and ventricular ectopic beat(VEB) versus the rest. For SVEB classification, the best accuracy, sensitivity, specificity and positive predictivity value are 98.9%, 90.0%, 99.3% and 82.4%, respectively, and for VEB classification, the numbers are 98.8%, 90.1%, 99.4% and 92.0%, respectively. The results show that the performance of our proposed approach is comparable to that of published research. The proposed low complexity algorithm has the potential to be implemented as an on-sensor machine learning solution.