A Novel Constraint-based Knee-guided Neuroevolutionary Algorithm for Context-specific ECG Early Classification

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are considered the greatest threat to human life according to World Health Organization. Early classification of CVDs and the appropriate follow-up treatment are crucial for preventing sudden deaths. Electrocardiogram (ECG) is one of the most common non-invasive tools used to evaluate the state of the heart, which can be exploited to automatically diagnose as well. However, the importance of diagnosing CVDs is varying in different context-specific scenarios. For example, ST-segment elevation (STE) is an acute myocardial infarction indicator for patients associated with chest pain and cardiac biomarker. In in-hospital healthcare, STE should be diagnosed with a higher priority than the other phenotypes of ECG. Hence, the context-specific requirements should be considered in ECG early classification problems. We formalize the ECG early classification problem as the context-specific time series classification problem. We propose a novel Constraint-based Knee-guided Neuroevolutionary Algorithm (CKNA) based on the Snippet Policy Networks V2 to solve this problem. To validate the proposed method, we perform a series of experiments on two public ECG datasets under various context-specific simulated scenarios after consulting with physicians specializing in the area. Experimental results show that CKNA significantly improves the average recall of disease classification by 5.5% compared to the competing baseline under user-specified requirements. Moreover, experimental results prove that CKNA presents a feasible solution for the early classifying of cardiac arrhythmias under different user-specified scenarios.