H-Infinity Filter Enhanced CNN-LSTM for Arrhythmia Detection from Heart Sound Recordings

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel CNN-H-Infinity-LSTM model that improves arrhythmia detection accuracy and robustness from heart sound recordings by integrating control theory concepts, outperforming existing methods on a public benchmark.

Contribution

The paper proposes a new CNN-H-Infinity-LSTM architecture that incorporates H-Infinity filter principles to enhance robustness and generalization in arrhythmia detection from heart sounds.

Findings

Achieved 99.42% test accuracy on PhysioNet dataset

F1 score of 98.85%, outperforming benchmarks

Demonstrated stable convergence and robustness

Abstract

Early detection of heart arrhythmia can prevent severe future complications in cardiac patients. While manual diagnosis still remains the clinical standard, it relies heavily on visual interpretation and is inherently subjective. In recent years, deep learning has emerged as a powerful tool to automate arrhythmia detection, offering improved accuracy, consistency, and efficiency. Several variants of convolutional and recurrent neural network architectures have been widely explored to capture spatial and temporal patterns in physiological signals. However, despite these advancements, current models often struggle to generalize well in real-world scenarios, especially when dealing with small or noisy datasets, which are common challenges in biomedical applications. In this paper, a novel CNN-H-Infinity-LSTM architecture is proposed to identify arrhythmic heart signals from heart sound recordings. This architecture introduces trainable parameters inspired by the H-Infinity filter from control theory, enhancing robustness and generalization. Extensive experimentation on the PhysioNet CinC Challenge 2016 dataset, a public benchmark of heart audio recordings, demonstrates that the proposed model achieves stable convergence and outperforms existing benchmarks, with a test accuracy of 99.42% and an F1 score of 98.85%.