Novel Classification of Ischemic Heart Disease Using Artificial Neural Network

Ischemic heart disease (IHD), particularly in its chronic stable form, is a subtle pathology due to its silent behavior before developing in unstable angina, myocardial infarction or sudden cardiac death. Machine learning techniques applied to parameters extracted form heart rate variability (HRV) signal seem to be a valuable support in the early diagnosis of some cardiac diseases. However, so far, IHD patients were identified using Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) applied to a limited number of HRV parameters and only to very few subjects. In this study, we used several linear and non-linear HRV parameters applied to ANNs, in order to confirm these results on a large cohort of 965 sample of subjects and to identify which features could discriminate IHD patients with high accuracy. By using principal component analysis and stepwise regression, we reduced the original 17 parameters to five, used as inputs, for a series of ANNs. The highest accuracy of 82% was achieved using meanRR, LFn, SD1, gender and age parameters and two hidden neurons.