Deep Learning for Cardiologist-level Myocardial Infarction Detection in Electrocardiograms

Myocardial infarction is the leading cause of death worldwide. In this paper, we design domain-inspired neural network models to detect myocardial infarction. First, we study the contribution of various leads. This systematic analysis, first of its kind in the literature, indicates that out of 15 ECG leads, data from the v6, vz, and ii leads are critical to correctly identify myocardial infarction. Second, we use this finding and adapt the ConvNetQuake neural network model—originally designed to identify earthquakes—to attain state-of-the-art classification results for myocardial infarction, achieving 99.43% classification accuracy on a record-wise split, and 97.83% classification accuracy on a patient-wise split. These two results represent cardiologist-level performance level for myocardial infarction detection after feeding only 10 s of raw ECG data into our model. Third, we show that our multi-ECG-channel neural network achieves cardiologist-level performance without the need of any kind of manual feature extraction or data pre-processing.