Deep Neural Network Approach for Continuous ECG‐Based Automated External Defibrillator Shock Advisory System During Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation

Background Because chest compressions induce artifacts in the ECG, current automated external defibrillators instruct the user to stop cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) while an automated rhythm analysis is performed. It has been shown that minimizing interruptions in CPR increases the chance of survival. Methods and Results The objective of this study was to apply a deep-learning algorithm using convolutional layers, residual networks, and bidirectional long short-term memory method to classify shockable versus nonshockable rhythms in the presence and absence of CPR artifact. Forty subjects' data from Physionet with 1131 shockable and 2741 nonshockable samples contaminated with 43 different CPR artifacts that were acquired from a commercial automated external defibrillator during asystole were used. We had separate data as train and test sets. Using our deep neural network model, the sensitivity and specificity of the shock versus no-shock decision for the entire data set over the 4-fold cross-validation sets were 95.21% and 86.03%, respectively. This result was based on the training and testing of the model using ECG data in both the presence and the absence of CPR artifact. For ECG without CPR artifact, the sensitivity was 99.04% and the specificity was 95.2%. A sensitivity of 94.21% and a specificity of 86.14% were obtained for ECG with CPR artifact. In addition to 4-fold cross-validation sets, we also examined leave-one-subject-out validation. The sensitivity and specificity for the case of leave-one-subject-out validation were 92.71% and 97.6%, respectively. Conclusions The proposed trained model can make shock versus nonshock decision in automated external defibrillators, regardless of CPR status. The results meet the American Heart Association's sensitivity requirement (>90%).