Detection of Atrial Fibrillation and Normal Sinus Rhythm Using Multiple Machine Learning Classifiers

In this era of eHealth, healthcare data has gained a significant importance due to having human survival information. Detection of the atrial fibrillation (AF) from electrocardiogram (ECG) rhythm is a promising area of research because of its critical impact on mortality ratio in all over the world. Although, most of the studies have shown more than 90% results accuracy in terms of specificity (Sp) and sensitivity (Se), yet this accuracy is not sufficient and cannot be considered reliable for AF continuous monitoring due to high ratio of false alarms. Existing works scarcely compare the accuracy of the results generated by a classifier with those of other robust classifiers. Further, the results are needed to be verified with more statistical measures. In this paper, a multiple classifiers-based model is proposed in which the transition between normal sinus rhythm (NSR) and AF are performed on the basis of ventricle activities of the heart. The proposed scheme first extracts several features that are pertinent to AF diagnosis from the ECG data. Later, the classification model categorizes rhythms into classes using statistical techniques. The experimental evaluation is performed on five datasets which include AF Challenge 2017 database, NSR database (NSRDB), NSR RR interval database (NSRDB-2), AF database (AFDB) and long-term AF database (LTAFDB). Based on verification of results using different measures, the proposed scheme outperforms in comparison to the existing systems in terms of area under the curve (AUC), Se, Sp, positive predictive value (PPV), accuracy (ACC), and negative predictive value (NPV) for all datasets. Specifically, the decision tree (DT) obtains 99% AUC, 92% Se and 98% Sp for the AF Challenge 2017 database, which are improved than parallel systems.