Utilizing language models for advanced electrocardiogram analysis

Electrocardiography (ECG) signals are often referred to as the language of the heart and have been widely utilized for diagnosing various heart ailments, particularly arrhythmias. Consequently, numerous machine learning models have been employed to automatically detect heart disorders using ECG signals. In this research, the primary objective is to detect arrhythmias using a center-symmetric self-organized textual pattern. A novel feature engineering model has been introduced, which includes the following components: (i) multilevel feature extraction using the proposed center-symmetric self-organized textual pattern (CSSOTP), (ii) iterative neighborhood component analysis (INCA), and (iii) classification using k-nearest neighbors (kNN) with 10-fold cross-validation. During the feature extraction phase, a multilevel feature extraction model incorporating maximum absolute pooling (MAP) and the proposed CSSOTP was applied. The CSSOTP was designed to select the most appropriate pattern for the given data block. A large language model (LLM) was leveraged to generate text for creating patterns, and ChatGPT was used to assist in text generation. To identify the most informative features, the INCA feature selector was employed, and the selected features were subsequently classified using the kNN classifier. An impressive 96.20 % classification accuracy was achieved by the CSSOTP-based feature engineering model when tested on an ECG dataset containing 17 classes. Furthermore, comparisons with state-of-the-art feature engineering models were conducted, demonstrating that the proposed model has superior classification capabilities.