# An Unsupervised Feature Learning Approach to Reduce False Alarm Rate in ICUs

## TL;DR

This paper introduces an unsupervised feature learning method to improve ICU alarm accuracy by distinguishing true arrhythmias from false alarms caused by noise and disturbances in ECG signals.

## Contribution

It presents a novel high-level feature extraction technique based on unsupervised learning and clustering to effectively differentiate between genuine arrhythmias and signal disturbances.

## Key findings

- Significant improvement in alarm detection accuracy.
- High sensitivity and specificity achieved with few features.
- Effective use of single-lead ECG signals.

## Abstract

The high rate of false alarms in intensive care units (ICUs) is one of the top challenges of using medical technology in hospitals. These false alarms are often caused by patients' movements, detachment of monitoring sensors, or different sources of noise and interference that impact the collected signals from different monitoring devices. In this paper, we propose a novel set of high-level features based on unsupervised feature learning technique in order to effectively capture the characteristics of different arrhythmia in electrocardiogram (ECG) signal and differentiate them from irregularity in signals due to different sources of signal disturbances. This unsupervised feature learning technique, first extracts a set of low-level features from all existing heart cycles of a patient, and then clusters these segments for each individual patient to provide a set of prominent high-level features. The objective of the clustering phase is to enable the classification method to differentiate between the high-level features extracted from normal and abnormal cycles (i.e., either due to arrhythmia or different sources of distortions in signal) in order to put more attention to the features extracted from abnormal portion of the signal that contribute to the alarm. The performance of this method is evaluated using the 2015 PhysioNet/Computing in Cardiology Challenge dataset for reducing false arrhythmia alarms in the ICUs. As confirmed by the experimental results, the proposed method offers a considerable performance in terms of accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of alarm detection only using a few high-level features that are extracted from one single lead ECG signal.