Single-Lead ECG Arrhythmia Classification Based on Peak-Enhanced Attention Network and Quality-Aware GAN Data Augmentation Framework

Single-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) is widely used in wearable devices for atrial fibrillation (AF) screening. Nevertheless, subtle pathological characteristics like P-waves and f-waves in practical signals are vulnerable to noise contamination. Meanwhile, the scarcity of high-quality annotated abnormal data instances leads to severe class imbalance. To mitigate these issues, we present an end-to-end framework designed for arrhythmia diagnosis using single-lead ECG signals, which integrates quality-aware data augmentation with a Peak-Enhanced attention mechanism. First, to mitigate the problem of data imbalance, a Quality-Aware Generative Adversarial Network (QA-GAN) is designed. This network integrates a signal quality evaluation module based on signal kurtosis, together with a dynamic soft-label training scheme, guiding the generator to prioritize learning high-quality morphological features, thereby synthesizing high-fidelity minority class samples. Second, to accurately capture subtle pathological features in electrocardiograms, a Peak-Enhanced Attention Convolutional Network (PEAC-Net) classification model is proposed. This model incorporates a Peak-Enhanced Attention (PE-Att) module, which employs learnable derivative convolutional kernels to precisely identify the transition points in the ECG signal. Furthermore, by integrating one-dimensional multi-scale dilated convolution (DSGC1D) with bidirectional LSTM, the model achieves effective capturing of both fine-grained local morphological features and long-range global rhythm patterns. Experimental results on the PhysioNet 2017 dataset indicate that the presented model attains an accuracy of 0.902 and a macro-F1 score of 0.880, respectively, outperforming other state-of-the-art models and also exhibiting robust data adaptability on the MIT-BIH dataset.