MACHINE LEARNING AND DEEP LEARNING FOR CARDIAC ARRHYTHMIA DETECTION: A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW OF TECHNIQUES, DATASETS, AND CLINICAL TRANSLATION
Author
Pradeep Kumar Tiwari, Dr. Nidhi Mishra
Abstract
Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) including arrhythmias remain the leading cause of global mortality, necessitating reliable automated detection frameworks that can augment clinical decision-making. The integration of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) with electrocardiogram (ECG) signal analysis has catalyzed significant advances in arrhythmia classification accuracy, clinical interpretability, and real-time monitoring capability. This paper presents a systematic review of ML and DL-based arrhythmia detection and cardiovascular disease prediction research published between 2023 and 2026. We survey the evolution from classical supervised learning algorithms — Logistic Regression, SVM, Random Forest, XGBoost — to sophisticated deep architectures including CNN-LSTM hybrids, attention-augmented BiLSTM networks, transformer-based models, and multi-scale convolutional dense networks. Benchmark datasets including MIT-BIH Arrhythmia, Kaggle CVD, and CPSC 2018 are analyzed alongside preprocessing strategies, feature engineering techniques, and class-imbalance remediation approaches. Identified research gaps encompass limited model generalizability, insufficient explainability in clinical settings, real-time deployment constraints on wearable devices, and the absence of robust benchmarking across diverse patient populations. Future research directions spanning transformer architectures, IoT-integrated monitoring, and explainable AI are discussed in detail.
Keywords
arrhythmia detection; ECG classification; machine learning; deep learning; CNN-LSTM; cardiovascular disease; MIT-BIH; attention mechanism; wavelet transform; explainable AI
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References
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