Resan: A Residual Dual‐Attention Network for Abnormal Cardiac Activity Detection

ABSTRACT Cardiovascular disease is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. Early and accurate detection of abnormal cardiac activity can be an effective way to prevent serious cardiovascular events. Electrocardiogram (ECG) and phonocardiogram (PCG) signals provide an objective evaluation of the heart's electrical and acoustic functions, enabling medical professionals to make an accurate diagnosis. Therefore, the cardiologists often use them to make a preliminary diagnosis of abnormal cardiac activity in clinical practice. For this reason, many diagnostic models have been proposed. However, these models fail to utilize the interaction information within and between the signals to aid the diagnosis of disease. To address this issue, we designed a residual dual‐attention network (ResAN) for the detection of abnormal cardiac activity using synchronized ECG and PCG signals. First, ResAN uses a feature learning module with two parallel residual networks, for example, ECG‐ResNet and PCG‐ResNet to automatically learn the deep modal‐specific features from the ECG and PCG sequences, respectively. Second, to fully utilize the available information of different modal signals, ResAN uses a dual‐attention fusion module to capture the salient features of the integrated ECG and PCG features learned by the feature learning module, as well as the alternating features between them based on the attention mechanisms. Finally, these fused features are merged and fed to the classification module to detect abnormal cardiac activity. Our model achieves an accuracy of 96.1%, surpassing the performances of comparison models by 1.0% to 9.9% when using synchronized ECG and PCG signals. Furthermore, the ablation study confirmed the efficacy of the components in ResAN and also showed that ResAN performs better with synchronized ECG and PCG signals compared to using single‐modal signals. Overall, ResAN provides a valid solution for the early detection of abnormal cardiac activity using ECG and PCG signals.