Artificial intelligence algorithms for the recognition of Brugada type 1 pattern on standard 12-leads ECG
Authors: Vozzi F , Dimitri GM , Piacenti M , Zucchelli G , Solarino G , Nesti M , Pieragnoli P , Gallicchio C , Persiani E , Morales MA , Micheli A 
Published: May 2022

Funding Acknowledgements

Type of funding sources: Public grant(s) – National budget only. Main funding source(s): This research project is funded by Tuscany Region

Background/Introduction

Electrocardiograms (ECGs) are rapidly moving from analog to digital versions. Consequently, a series of automatic analyses of standard 12-lead ECGs are attracting interest for their ability to support clinicians in the automatic recognition of specific features associated with different cardiac diseases [2]. Artificial Intelligence applications and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms have gained much attention in the last years for their ability to figure out patterns from data independently, without being explicitly taught rules. Peculiar features define the ECGs of patients with Brugada Syndrome (BrS); however, ambiguities still exist for the correct diagnosis of BrS and discrimination with respect to other pathologies.

Purpose

The BrAID (Brugada syndrome and Artificial Intelligence applications to Diagnosis) project aims to develop an innovative system for diagnosing Type 1 BrS based on ECG pattern recognition through the application of ML algorithms. In this work, an application of Echo State Networks (ESN), a type of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), for the diagnosis of BrS from ECG is presented.

Methods

After approval from the Local Ethical Committees, 12-lead ECGs were obtained in patients enrolled in 5 Centers diagnosed with typical spontaneous Type 1 pattern (coved) (group A, 81 patients). Baseline ECG was also collected in patients undergoing the ajmaline test, classified as positive (group B, 37 patients) or negative (group C, 14 patients) according to test results. 174 patients with no clinical and familial history of arrhythmias were considered controls (group D). Data were collected from 4 beats extracted from the ECGs as input to the ESN. The datasets obtained in the different groups were used for the ESN model’s training and assessment (testing) through a double cross-validation approach.

Results

As shown in Table 1, the performances using three leads (V1, V2, V3) or V2 only were compared.

The algorithm performance was assessed in all the datasets (group A+B+C+D) and in spontaneous BrS (group A) and controls (group D). A good accuracy (79.21%) was seen when the three leads were considered for groups A and D only; the best test set accuracy (80.20%) was obtained in the case in which V2 only was used as input in all the datasets.

Conclusion(s)

In this work, a novel system for diagnosing Type 1 BrS using an ESN approach was developed. Our preliminary results show that this ML model is able to detect ECG patterns associated with Type 1 BrS with good and comparable accuracy both when three leads (79.21% ) or V2 only (80.20%) were analyzed. The future availability of larger datasets could improve the model performance, increasing the ESN potentialities as a clinical support system tool to be used in everyday clinical practice.

Table 1. The accuracy, specificity, and sensitivity reported for each dataset group are obtained through double cross-validation.