Towards High Generalization Performance on Electrocardiogram Classification

Recently, many electrocardiogram (ECG) classification algorithms using deep learning have been proposed. The characteristics of ECG vary from dataset to dataset for various reasons (i.e., hospital, race, etc.). Therefore, it is important for a model to have high generalization performance consistently over all datasets. In this paper, as part of the PhysioNet / Computing in Cardiology Challenge 2021, we present a model developed to classify cardiac abnormalities from 12 lead and reduced-lead ECGs. In particular, to upgrade our previous model for improving generalization performance, we newly adopt constant-weighted cross-entropy loss, additional features, Mixup augmentation, and squeeze/excitation block, OneCycle learning rate scheduler, which are selected via evaluation of generalization performance using leave-one-dataset-out cross-validation setting. With the present model, our DSAILSNU team has received challenge scores of 0.55, 0.58, 0.58, 0.57 and 0.57 (ranked 2nd, 1st, 1st, 2nd, 2nd out of 39 teams) for the 12-lead, 6-lead, 4-lead, 3-lead, and 2-lead versions of the hidden test set, respectively. The present model achieves higher generalization performance over all versions of the hidden test set than the model submitted last year.