Electrocardiogram (ECG) is one of the most important diagnostic tools in clinical applications. With the advent of advanced algorithms, various deep learning models have been adopted for ECG tasks. However, the potential of Transformers for ECG data is not yet realized, despite their widespread success in computer vision and natural language processing. In this work, we present a useful masked Transformer method for ECG classification referred to as MTECG, which expands the application of masked autoencoders to ECG time series. We construct a dataset comprising 220,251 ECG recordings with a broad range of diagnoses annoated by medical experts to explore the properties of MTECG. Under the proposed training strategies, a lightweight model with 5.7M parameters performs stably well on a broad range of masking ratios (5%-75%). The ablation studies highlight the importance of fluctuated reconstruction targets, training schedule length, layer-wise LR decay and DropPath rate. The experiments on both private and public ECG datasets demonstrate that MTECG-T significantly outperforms the recent state-of-the-art algorithms in ECG classification.

本研究提出了一种名为MTECG的有用的掩模Transformer方法，将掩模自编码器应用于心电图时间序列，实验结果在心电图分类中表现显著优于最新的算法。

掩码变压器用于心电图分类