Transfer learning for predicting acute myocardial infarction using electrocardiograms

At the emergency department, it is important to quickly and accurately identify patients at risk of acute myocardial infarction (AMI). One of the main tools for detecting AMI is the electrocardiogram (ECG), which can be difficult to interpret manually. There is a long history of applying machine learning algorithms to ECGs, but such algorithms are quite data hungry, and correctly labeled high-quality ECGs are difficult to obtain. Transfer learning has been a successful strategy for mitigating data requirements in other applications, but the benefits for predicting AMI are understudied. Here we show that a straightforward application of transfer learning leads to large improvements also in this domain. We pre-train models to classify sex and age using a collection of 840 k ECGs from non-chest-pain patients, and fine-tune the resulting models to predict AMI using 44 k ECGs from chest-pain patients. The results are compared with models trained without transfer learning. We find a considerable improvement from transfer learning, consistent across multiple state-of-the-art ResNet architectures and data sizes, with the best performing model improving from 0.79 AUC to 0.85 AUC. This suggests that even a simple form of transfer learning from a moderately sized dataset of non-chest-pain ECGs can lead to major improvements in predicting AMI.