Efficient Learning of Big ECG Data for Ventricular Fibrillation Warning

Ventricular fibrillation is the most lethal arrhythmia. At present, the treatment of ventricular fibrillation is commonly received after the onset of the disease, which mainly depends on external defibrillation and drug-assisted therapy. Although activity of heartbeats can be described and analyzed using the most popular technique ECG (electrocardiogram), there is still no widely recognized prediction methods for ventricular fibrillation. Therefore, in this paper, in order to realize warning of ventricular fibrillation, we focus on the detection of atrial fibrillation and ventricular flutter, which are the arrhythmias often occurring before ventricular fibrillation. We propose a frequency-domain LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory), which uses heartbeat waves transformed from the original time domain into the frequency domain as input. Furthermore, to address the problem of big ECG data training efficiency and scalability, we also provide an implementation of our method under the distributed computing framework MapReduce in the Spark cluster. Experimental results indicate that our method achieves excellent classification performance compared with rival methods.