Multiple electrocardiogram generator with single-lead electrocardiogram

Abstract

Background and objective: Electrocardiogram (ECG) is measured in various ways. The three main ECG measurement methods include resting ECG, Holter monitoring, and treadmill method. In standard ECG measurement methods, multiple electrodes are attached to the limb and chest. Limb and chest leads measure the frontal and sagittal planes of the heart, respectively. In this case, ECG signals are measured briefly up to 10 seconds. To measure ECG signals based on a single lead, wearable devices have been developed that could measure long-term ECG signals daily. ECG signals are vectors in the heart, which is a three-dimensional structure. Therefore, a single-lead measurement lacks detailed information. The objective of this study was to synthesize multiple ECGs from a single-lead ECG using a generative adversarial network (GAN).

Methods: We trained our model with two independent datasets and one combined dataset. For experiment 1, the PTB-XL dataset was used as the training set, and the China dataset was used as the test set. For experiment 2, the China dataset was used as the training set, and the PTB-XL was used as the test set. Optimized GAN models were obtained for each experiment and evaluated.

Results: The Fréchet distance (FD) score and mean squared error (MSE) were used for evaluation. The FD and MSE scores for experiments 1 and 2 were 7.237 and 0.024, and 8.055 and 0.011, respectively.

Conclusion: We proposed a method to overcome the limitations of modern ECG measurement methods. Low FD and MSE scores not only indicate the possibility but also the similarity between synthesized ECG and reference ECG when compared in ECG paper format. This indicates that the proposed method can be applied to wearable devices that measure single-lead ECG.