Lightweight Multi-task CNN for ECG Diagnosis with GRU-Diffusion

With the increasing demand for real-time Electrocardiogram (ECG) classification on edge devices, existing models face challenges of high computational cost and limited accuracy on imbalanced datasets.This paper presents Multi-task DFNet, a lightweight multi-task framework for ECG classification across the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database and the PTB Diagnostic ECG Database, enabling efficient task collaboration by dynamically sharing knowledge across tasks, such as arrhythmia detection, myocardial infarction (MI) classification, and other cardiovascular abnormalities. The proposed method integrates GRU-augmented Diffusion, where the GRU is embedded within the diffusion model to capture temporal dependencies better and generate high-quality synthetic signals for imbalanced classes. The experimental results show that Multi-task DFNet achieves 99.72% and 99.89% accuracy on the MIT-BIH dataset and PTB dataset, respectively, with significantly fewer parameters compared to traditional models, making it suitable for deployment on wearable ECG monitors. This work offers a compact and efficient solution for multi-task ECG diagnosis, providing a promising potential for edge healthcare applications on resource-constrained devices.