Enhancing ECG classification with continuous wavelet transform and multi-branch transformer.

Background: Accurate classification of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals is crucial for automatic diagnosis of heart diseases. However, existing ECG classification methods often require complex preprocessing and denoising operations, and traditional convolutional neural network (CNN)-based methods struggle to capture complex relationships and high-level time-series features. Method: In this study, we propose an ECG classification method based on continuous wavelet transform and multi-branch transformer. The method utilizes continuous wavelet transform (CWT) to convert the ECG signal into time-series feature map, eliminating the need for complicated preprocessing. Additionally, the multi-branch transformer is introduced to enhance feature extraction during model training and improve classification performance by removing redundant information while preserving important features. Results: The proposed method was evaluated on the CPSC 2018 (6877 cases) and MIT-BIH (47 cases) ECG public datasets, achieving an accuracy of 98.53% and 99.38%, respectively, with F1 scores of 97.57% and 98.65%. These results outperformed most existing methods, demonstrating the excellent performance of the proposed method. Conclusion: The proposed method accurately classifies the ECG time-series feature map, which holds promise for the diagnosis of cardiac arrhythmias. The findings of this study are valuable for advancing the field of automatic ECG diagnosis.