LAUSR

OBJECTIVE Detection of atrial fibrillation is important for risk stratification of stroke. We developed a novel methodology to classify electrocardiograms (ECGs) to normal, atrial fibrillation and other cardiac dysrhythmias as defined by the PhysioNet Challenge 2017. APPROACH More specifically, we used piecewise linear splines for the feature selection and a gradient boosting algorithm for the classifier. In the algorithm, the ECG waveform is fitted by a piecewise linear spline, and morphological features relating to the piecewise linear spline coefficients are extracted. XGBoost is used to classify the morphological coefficients and heart rate variability features. MAIN RESULTS The performance of the algorithm was evaluated by the PhysioNet Challenge database (3658 ECGs classified by experts). Our algorithm achieved an average F 1 score of 81% for a 10-fold cross-validation and also achieved 81% for F 1 score on the independent testing set. This score is similar to the top 9th score (81%) in the official phase of the PhysioNet Challenge 2017. SIGNIFICANCE Our algorithm presents a good performance on multi-label short ECG classification with selected morphological features.