Automated detection of coronary artery disease using different durations of ECG segments with convolutional neural network

Coronary artery disease (CAD) is caused due by the blockage of inner walls of coronary arteries by plaque. This constriction reduces the blood flow to the heart muscles resulting in myocardial infarction (MI). The electrocardiogram (ECG) is commonly used to screen the cardiac health. The ECG signals are nonstationary and nonlinear in nature whereby the transient disease indicators may appear randomly on the time scale. Therefore, the procedure to diagnose the abnormal beat is arduous, time consuming and prone to human errors. The automated diagnosis system overcomes these problems. In this study, convolutional neural network (CNN) structures comprising of four convolutional layers, four max pooling layers and three fully connected layers are proposed for the diagnosis of CAD using two and five seconds durations of ECG signal segments. Deep CNN is able to differentiate between normal and abnormal ECG with an accuracy of 94.95%, sensitivity of 93.72%, and specificity of 95.18% for Net 1 (two seconds) and accuracy of 95.11%, sensitivity of 91.13% and specificity of 95.88% for Net 2 (5 s). The proposed system can help the clinicians in their accurate and reliable decision making of CAD using ECG signals.