Enhanced arrhythmia diagnosis using a hybrid deep learning model: A CNN-LSTM-GRU approach on ECG data

Arrhythmia is a condition in which a person's heartbeat is irregular and can pose serious health risks. Effective arrhythmia detection is necessary to reduce associated risks. This study aims to develop a new deep learning architecture combining Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to extract features, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTMs) to handle sequential data, and Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs) to reduce computational resources, leveraging the strengths of each to achieve better classification accuracy for diagnosing using the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database. The data is preprocessed by 0.5 Hz (low) and 50 Hz (high) to remove noise, then segmented into smaller, normalized signals to a unique scale, determine the higher point of the QRS complex in ECG, then gets labeled each segment, and finally converted ECG segment to (2D). The proposed model outperforms models on CNN, LSTM, and GRU if we apply them alone, with a precision of 92%, F1-score of 97%, recall of 100%, and accuracy of 97%; this study's notable discovery is that the suggested method may substantially decrease the duration when using RNN networks in conjunction with CNN. This paper presents a cost-effective approach to ECG signal reduction and a robust automatic scheme for arrhythmia detection, leveraging the strengths of CNN, LSTM, and GRU networks. The suggested model has achieved significant improvements in accuracy and is potentially a useful tool for real-time clinical practice. • A novel hybrid deep learning model combining CNN, LSTM, and GRU for ECG analysis. • Robust preprocessing pipeline improves ECG signal quality and arrhythmia classification. • Achieves 97% accuracy, 100% recall, and 97% F1-score on the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia dataset. • Outperforms standalone CNN, LSTM, and GRU models in efficiency and accuracy. • Demonstrates potential for real-time, cost-effective arrhythmia diagnosis in healthcare.