Detecting atrial fibrillation by deep convolutional neural networks

•A new application of deep convolutional neural network to the detection of atrial fibrillation was explored.•The short-term Fourier transform and stationary wavelet transform were used separately for signal conversion.•Good classification performance was obtained for ECG segments as short as 5 s.•Performance was not dependent on the detection of P or R peaks and the extraction of hand-crafted features.