DAMBLO: Improving arrhythmia classification with plug-and-play dual attention-based multiscale feature learning blocke

The electrocardiogram diagnosis played an important role in early arrhythmia prevention and cardiovascular disease detection. How to analysis and detect the electrocardiogram automatically becomes a challenging task in clinical practice. Convolutional neural network based approaches have been widely applied in the field of automatic arrhythmia detection and analysis. However, the existing methods fails to preserve the abundant and essential latent representatives from multiple dimensions. To address these problems, a dual spatial-channel aggregation module is proposed, which expects to concentrate on the prominent target information along spatial and channel dimension of electrocardiogram signals. Moreover, a multi-scale enhancement module with channel-wise gating mechanism is also proposed to enlarge the receptive resolution and further to improve the learning ability of long-range dependencies from the global information. Furthermore, these two proposed modules are integrated as a “plug-and-play” block that can be easily adopted as a drop-in replacement for any 3×3 convolution layers in convolutional neural networ based architectures. In order to evaluate the effectiveness and generalization of the proposed block, it is plugged in a series of convolutional neural network based frameworks and are evaluated on two benchmark datasets, MIT-BIH and PTB. The extensive experimental results show that the proposed “plug-and-play” block can significantly improve the arrhythmia classification performance. Moreover, compared to other state-of-the-art methods, the framework plugged with the proposed block can achieve a competitive classification performance, proving the feasibility and advancement of the proposed dual attention-based multiscale feature learning block.