TinyML Design Contest for Life-Threatening Ventricular Arrhythmia Detection

The first ACM/IEEE TinyML Design Contest (TDC) held at the 41st International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD) in 2022 is a challenging, multi-month, research and development competition. TDC'22 focuses on real-world medical problems that require the innovation and implementation of artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) algorithms on implantable devices. The challenge problem of TDC'22 is to develop a novel AI/ML-based real-time detection algorithm for life-threatening ventricular arrhythmia over low-power microcontrollers utilized in Implantable Cardioverter-Defibrillators (ICDs). The dataset contains more than 38,000 5-second intracardiac electrograms (IEGMs) segments over 8 different types of rhythm from 90 subjects. The dedicated hardware platform is NUCLEO-L432KC manufactured by STMicroelectronics. TDC'22, which is open to multi-person teams world-wide, attracted more than 150 teams from over 50 organizations. This paper first presents the medical problem, dataset, and evaluation procedure in detail. It further demonstrates and discusses the designs developed by the leading teams as well as representative results. This paper concludes with the direction of improvement for the future TinyML design for health monitoring applications.

Personalized Deep Learning for Ventricular Arrhythmias Detection on Medical IoT Systems

Life-threatening ventricular arrhythmias (VA) are the leading cause of sudden cardiac death (SCD), which is the most significant cause of natural death in the US. The implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) is a small device implanted to patients under high risk of SCD as a preventive treatment. The ICD continuously monitors the intracardiac rhythm and delivers shock when detecting the life-threatening VA. Traditional methods detect VA by setting criteria on the detected rhythm. However, those methods suffer from a high inappropriate shock rate and require a regular follow-up to optimize criteria parameters for each ICD recipient. To ameliorate the challenges, we propose the personalized computing framework for deep learning based VA detection on medical IoT systems. The system consists of intracardiac and surface rhythm monitors, and the cloud platform for data uploading, diagnosis, and CNN model personalization. We equip the system with real-time inference on both intracardiac and surface rhythm monitors. To improve the detection accuracy, we enable the monitors to detect VA collaboratively by proposing the cooperative inference. We also introduce the CNN personalization for each patient based on the computing framework to tackle the unlabeled and limited rhythm data problem. When compared with the traditional detection algorithm, the proposed method achieves comparable accuracy on VA rhythm detection and 6.6% reduction in inappropriate shock rate, while the average inference latency is kept at 71ms.