ART-Net: An Attention-Based Hybrid ResNet-Transformer Network for 12-lead ECG Signal Classification*

Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal classification is an important task in healthcare as it plays a vital role in early prevention and diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases. In this work, we propose an attention-based hybrid ResNet-Transformer network (ART-Net) for 12-lead ECG signal classification. It is comprised of a stacked multi-scale attention-based ResNet and self-attention-based Transformer. At first, ECG signals are divided into several signal segments with the same length. Then multi-scale features are extracted by attention-based Resnet through signal segments, and attention mechanisms are used to adjust the weight of different channel features based on their importance. Next, these multi-scale features from a same ECG signal are integrated in chronological order as input to the Transformer network. In this end, extracting and fusing contextual information based on self-attention mechanism, and extracting the correlation between beats at different positions. The experimental results on CPSC2018 indicate that our model outperforms three state-of-the-art methods, and achieve 85.27% of accuracy, 86.01% of sensitivity and 85.59% of specificity, respectively.