PVCsNet : A Specialized Artificial Intelligence-Based Model to Classify Premature Ventricular Contractions From ECG Images

Premature ventricular complexes (PVCs) are irregularities in heart rhythm where the ventricles contract earlier than expected, disrupting the normal cardiac cycle. Identifying the origin of PVCs before surgery is crucial as it can reduce operation duration, lower radiation exposure, and potentially enhance ablation success rates. Current detection methods face limitations in accuracy and data processing, often requiring large datasets and complex interpretations. This study presents PVCsNet, a deep-learning network specifically designed for classifying premature ventricular complexes (PVCs) in ECG images. It incorporates residual structures and attention mechanisms to enhance classification performance. PVCsNet consists of four 3 × 3 convolutional layers as feature extractors, followed by residual connections and attention blocks. This design enables the network to map image features to class probability distributions, enhancing performance even with limited data. Our experimental results demonstrate that using the SE Block with MaxPool and a ratio of 4, PVCsNet achieves an overall accuracy of 94.49%, with high precision in critical categories and a moderate parameter size. We successfully categorize the data into six distinct classes based on their origin locations in the heart: right ventricular outflow tract (RVOT), left ventricular outflow tract (LVOT), papillary muscle (PM), valvular annulus (VA), summit, and His-Purkinje system (HPS). Among these, RVOT is the most common and crucial origin of PVCs. PM and HPS are also significant origins due to their clinical implications. This study demonstrates the potential of PVCsNet in clinical diagnostics, providing promising results in classifying ECG images and contributing to future medical research and diagnosis.