Physics-driven Spatiotemporal Regularization for High-dimensional Predictive Modeling: A Novel Approach to Solve the Inverse ECG Problem

Automated identification of atrial fibrillation from single-lead ECGs using multi-branching ResNet

Introduction: Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common cardiac arrhythmia, which is clinically identified with irregular and rapid heartbeat rhythm. AF puts a patient at risk of forming blood clots, which can eventually lead to heart failure, stroke, or even sudden death. Electrocardiography (ECG), which involves acquiring bioelectrical signals from the body surface to reflect heart activity, is a standard procedure for detecting AF. However, the occurrence of AF is often intermittent, costing a significant amount of time and effort from medical doctors to identify AF episodes. Moreover, human error is inevitable, as even experienced medical professionals can overlook or misinterpret subtle signs of AF. As such, it is of critical importance to develop an advanced analytical model that can automatically interpret ECG signals and provide decision support for AF diagnostics. Methods: In this paper, we propose an innovative deep-learning method for automated AF identification using single-lead ECGs. We first extract time-frequency features from ECG signals using continuous wavelet transform (CWT). Second, the convolutional neural networks enhanced with residual learning (ReNet) are employed as the functional approximator to interpret the time-frequency features extracted by CWT. Third, we propose to incorporate a multi-branching structure into the ResNet to address the issue of class imbalance, where normal ECGs significantly outnumber instances of AF in ECG datasets. Results and Discussion: We evaluate the proposed Multi-branching Resnet with CWT (CWT-MB-Resnet) with two ECG datasets, i.e., PhysioNet/CinC challenge 2017 and ECGs obtained from the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center (OUHSC). The proposed CWT-MB-Resnet demonstrates robust prediction performance, achieving an F1 score of 0.8865 for the PhysioNet dataset and 0.7369 for the OUHSC dataset. The experimental results signify the model's superior capability in balancing precision and recall, which is a desired attribute for ensuring reliable medical diagnoses.

An expert review of the inverse problem in electrocardiographic imaging for the non-invasive identification of atrial fibrillation drivers

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE

Electrocardiographic imaging (ECGI) has emerged as a non-invasive approach to identify atrial fibrillation (AF) driver sources. This paper aims to collect and review the current research literature on the ECGI inverse problem, summarize the research progress, and propose potential research directions for the future.

METHODS AND RESULTS

The effectiveness and feasibility of using ECGI to map AF driver sources may be influenced by several factors, such as inaccuracies in the atrial model due to heart movement or deformation, noise interference in high-density body surface potential (BSP), inconvenient and time-consuming BSP acquisition, errors in solving the inverse problem, and incomplete interpretation of the AF driving source information derived from the reconstructed epicardial potential. We review the current research progress on these factors and discuss possible improvement directions. Additionally, we highlight the limitations of ECGI itself, including the lack of a gold standard to validate the accuracy of ECGI technology in locating AF drivers and the challenges associated with guiding AF ablation based on post-processed epicardial potentials due to the intrinsic difference between epicardial and endocardial potentials.

CONCLUSIONS

Before performing ablation, ECGI can provide operators with predictive information about the underlying locations of AF driver by non-invasively and globally mapping the biatrial electrical activity. In the future, endocardial catheter mapping technology may benefit from the use of ECGI to enhance the diagnosis and ablation of AF.

Value-based neural representations predict social decision preferences

Social decision-making is omnipresent in everyday life, carrying the potential for both positive and negative consequences for the decision-maker and those closest to them. While evidence suggests that decision-makers use value-based heuristics to guide choice behavior, very little is known about how decision-makers' representations of other agents influence social choice behavior. We used multivariate pattern expression analyses on fMRI data to understand how value-based processes shape neural representations of those affected by one's social decisions and whether value-based encoding is associated with social decision preferences. We found that stronger value-based encoding of a given close other (e.g. parent) relative to a second close other (e.g. friend) was associated with a greater propensity to favor the former during subsequent social decision-making. These results are the first to our knowledge to explicitly show that value-based processes affect decision behavior via representations of close others.

Hierarchical deep learning with Generative Adversarial Network for automatic cardiac diagnosis from ECG signals

Cardiac disease is the leading cause of death in the US. Accurate heart disease detection is critical to timely medical treatment to save patients' lives. Routine use of the electrocardiogram (ECG) is the most common method for physicians to assess the cardiac electrical activities and detect possible abnormal conditions. Fully utilizing the ECG data for reliable heart disease detection depends on developing effective analytical models. In this paper, we propose a two-level hierarchical deep learning framework with Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) for ECG signal analysis. The first-level model is composed of a Memory-Augmented Deep AutoEncoder with GAN (MadeGAN), which aims to differentiate abnormal signals from normal ECGs for anomaly detection. The second-level learning aims at robust multi-class classification for different arrhythmia identification, which is achieved by integrating the transfer learning technique to transfer knowledge from the first-level learning with the multi-branching architecture to handle the data-lacking and imbalanced data issues. We evaluate the performance of the proposed framework using real-world ECG data from the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database. Experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms existing methods that are commonly used in current practice.

Multi-Branching Temporal Convolutional Network for Sepsis Prediction

Sepsis is among the leading causes of morbidity and mortality in modern intensive care units. Accurate sepsis prediction is of critical importance to save lives and reduce medical costs. The rapid advancements in sensing and information technology facilitate the effective monitoring of patients health conditions, generating a wealth of medical data, and provide an unprecedented opportunity for data-driven diagnosis of sepsis. However, real-world medical data are often complexly structured with a high level of uncertainty (e.g., missing values, imbalanced data). Realizing the full data potential depends on developing effective analytical models. In this paper, we propose a novel predictive framework with Multi-Branching Temporal Convolutional Network (MB-TCN) to model the complexly structured medical data for robust prediction of sepsis. The MB-TCN framework not only efficiently handles the missing value and imbalanced data issues but also effectively captures the temporal pattern and heterogeneous variable interactions. We evaluate the performance of the proposed MB-TCN in predicting sepsis using real-world medical data from PhysioNet/Computing in Cardiology Challenge 2019. Experimental results show that MB-TCN outperforms existing methods that are commonly used in current practice.

IRN-MLSQR: An improved iterative reweight norm approach to the inverse problem of electrocardiography incorporating factorization-free preconditioned LSQR

The inverse problem of electrocardiography (ECG) of computing epicardial potentials from body surface potentials, is an ill-posed problem and needs to be solved by regularization techniques. The L2-norm regularization can cause considerable smoothing of the solution, while the L1-norm scheme promotes a solution with sharp boundaries/gradients between piecewise smooth regions, so L1-norm is widely used in the ECG inverse problem. However, large amount of computation and long computation time are needed in the L1-norm scheme. In this paper, by combining iterative reweight norm (IRN) with a factorization-free preconditioned LSQR algorithm (MLSQR), a new IRN-MLSQR method was proposed to accelerate the convergence speed of the L1-norm scheme. We validated the IRN-MLSQR method using experimental data from isolated canine hearts and clinical procedures in the electrophysiology laboratory. The results showed that the IRN-MLSQR method can significantly reduce the number of iterations and operation time while ensuring the calculation accuracy. The number of iterations of the IRN-MLSQR method is about 60%-70% that of the conventional IRN method, and at the same time, the accuracy of the solution is almost the same as that of the conventional IRN method. The proposed IRN-MLSQR method may be used as a new approach to the inverse problem of ECG.

Evaluation of multivariate adaptive non-parametric reduced-order model for solving the inverse electrocardiography problem: a simulation study

In the inverse electrocardiography (ECG) problem, the goal is to reconstruct the heart's electrical activity from multichannel body surface potentials and a mathematical model of the torso. Over the years, researchers have employed various approaches to solve this ill-posed problem including regularization, optimization, and statistical estimation. It is still a topic of interest especially for researchers and clinicians whose goal is to adopt this technique in clinical applications. Among the wide range of mathematical tools available in the fields of operational research, inverse problems, optimization, and parameter estimation, spline-based techniques have been applied to inverse problems in several areas. If proper spline bases are chosen, the complexity of the problem can be significantly reduced while increasing estimation accuracy. However, there are few studies within the context of the inverse ECG problem that take advantage of this property of the spline-based approaches. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines (MARS)-based method for the solution of the inverse ECG problem using two different collections of simulated data. The results show that the MARS-based method improves the inverse ECG solutions and is "robust" to modeling errors, especially in terms of localizing the arrhythmia sources. Graphical Abstract Multivariate adaptive non-parametric model for inverse ECG problem.

Characterizing the Location and Extent of Myocardial Infarctions With Inverse ECG Modeling and Spatiotemporal Regularization

Myocardial infarction (MI) is among the leading causes of death in the United States. It is imperative to identify and characterize MIs for timely delivery of life-saving medical interventions. Cardiac electrical activity propagates in space and evolves over time. Traditional works focus on the analysis of time-domain ECG (e.g., 12-lead ECG) on the body surface for the detection of MIs, but tend to overlook spatiotemporal dynamics in the heart. Body surface potential mappings (BSPMs) provide high-resolution distribution of electric potentials over the entire torso, and therefore provide richer information than 12-lead ECG. However, BSPM are available on the body surface. Clinicians are in need of a closer look of the electric potentials in the heart to investigate cardiac pathology and optimize treatment strategies. In this paper, we applied the method of spatiotemporal inverse ECG (ST-iECG) modeling to map electrical potentials from the body surface to the heart, and then characterize the location and extent of MIs by investigating the reconstructed heart-surface electrograms. First, we investigate the impact of mesh resolution on the inverse ECG modeling. Second, we solve the inverse ECG problem and reconstruct heart-surface electrograms using the ST-iECG model. Finally, we propose a wavelet-clustering method to investigate the pathological behaviors of heart-surface electrograms, and thereby characterize the extent and location of MIs. The proposed methodology is evaluated and validated with real data of MIs from human subjects. Experimental results show that negative QRS waves in heart-surface electrograms indicate potential regions of MI, and the proposed ST-iECG model yields superior characterization results of MIs on the heart surface over existing methods.