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© 2025 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

Abstract

This study investigates the potential benefits of polar-transformed ECG spectrograms in comparison with conventional ECG spectrograms in terms of the visualization of R-R intervals and deep learning predictions of cardiac arrhythmia. The results suggest that polar-transformed ECG spectrograms could serve as an alternative approach for on-device AI applications in heart rhythm monitoring.

There is a lack of studies on the effectiveness of polar-transformed spectrograms in the visualization and prediction of cardiac arrhythmias from electrocardiogram (ECG) data. In this study, single-lead ECG waveforms were converted into two-dimensional rectangular time–frequency spectrograms and polar time–frequency spectrograms. Three pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN) models (ResNet50, MobileNet, and DenseNet121) served as baseline networks for model development and testing. Prediction performance and visualization quality were evaluated across various image resolutions. The trade-offs between image resolution and model capacity were quantitatively analyzed. Polar-transformed spectrograms demonstrated superior delineation of R-R intervals at lower image resolutions (e.g., 96 × 96 pixels) compared to conventional spectrograms. For deep-learning-based classification of cardiac arrhythmias, polar-transformed spectrograms achieved comparable accuracy to conventional spectrograms across all evaluated resolutions. The results suggest that polar-transformed spectrograms are particularly advantageous for deep CNN predictions at lower resolutions, making them suitable for edge computing applications where the reduced use of computing resources, such as memory and power consumption, is desirable.

Details

Title
Potential Benefits of Polar Transformation of Time–Frequency Electrocardiogram (ECG) Signals for Evaluation of Cardiac Arrhythmia
Author
Kang Hanbit; Kwon Daehyun; Yoon-Chul, Kim  VIAFID ORCID Logo 
First page
7980
Publication year
2025
Publication date
2025
Publisher
MDPI AG
e-ISSN
20763417
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
3233064773
Copyright
© 2025 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.