Bag of Tricks for Electrocardiogram Classification with Deep Neural Networks

Recent algorithmic advances in electrocardiogram (ECG) classification are largely contributed to deep learning. However, these methods are still based on a relatively straightforward application of deep neural networks (DNNs), which leaves incredible room for improvement. In this paper, as part of the PhysioNet / Computing in Cardiology Challenge 2020, we developed an 18-layer residual convolutional neural network to classify clinical cardiac abnormalities from 12-lead ECG recordings. We focused on examining a collection of data pre-processing, model architecture, training, and post-training procedure refinements for DNN-based ECG classification. We showed that by combining these refinements, we can improve the classification performance significantly. Our team, DSAIL_SNU, obtained a 0.695 challenge score using 10-fold cross-validation, and a 0.420 challenge score on the full test data, placing us 6th in the official ranking.