Research on ECG Pathological Signal Classification Empowered by Diffusion Generative Data

ObjectiveElectroCardioGram (ECG) signals are key indicators of human health. However, their complex composition and diverse features make visual recognition prone to errors. This study proposes a classification algorithm for ECG pathological signals based on data generation. A Diffusion Generative Network (DGN), also known as a diffusion model, progressively adds noise to real ECG signals until they approach a noise distribution, thereby facilitating model processing. To improve generation speed and reduce memory usage, a Knowledge Distillation-Diffusion Generative Network (KD-DGN) is proposed, which demonstrates superior memory efficiency and generation performance compared with the traditional DGN. This work compares the memory usage, generation efficiency, and classification accuracy of DGN and KD-DGN, and analyzes the characteristics of the generated data after lightweight processing. In addition, the classification effects of the original MIT-BIH dataset and an extended dataset (MIT-BIH-PLUS) are evaluated. Experimental results show that convolutional networks extract richer feature information from the extended dataset generated by DGN, leading to improved recognition performance of ECG pathological signals.MethodsThe generative network-based ECG signal generation algorithm is designed to enhance the performance of convolutional networks in ECG signal classification. The process begins with a Gaussian noise-based image perturbation algorithm, which obscures the original ECG data by introducing controlled randomness. This step simulates real-world variability, enabling the model to learn more robust representations. A diffusion generative algorithm is then applied to reconstruct and reproduce the data, generating synthetic ECG signals that preserve the essential characteristics of the original categories despite the added noise. This reconstruction ensures that the underlying features of ECG signals are retained, allowing the convolutional network to extract more informative features during classification. To improve efficiency, the approach incorporates knowledge distillation. A teacher-student framework is adopted in which a lightweight student model is trained from the original, more complex teacher ECG data generation model. This strategy reduces computational requirements and accelerates the data generation process, improving suitability for practical applications. Finally, two comparative experiments are designed to validate the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed method. These experiments evaluate classification performance against existing approaches and provide quantitative evidence of its advantages in ECG signal processing.Results and DiscussionsThe data generation algorithm yields ECG signals with a Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) comparable to that of the original data, while presenting more discernible signal features. The student model constructed through knowledge distillation produces ECG samples with the same SNR as those generated by the teacher model, but with substantially reduced complexity. Specifically, the student model achieves a 50% reduction in size, 37.5% lower memory usage, and a 57% shorter runtime compared with the teacher model (Fig. 6). When the convolutional network is trained with data generated by the KD-DGN, its classification performance improves across all metrics compared with a convolutional network trained without KD-DGN. Precision reaches 95.7%, and the misidentification rate is reduced to approximately 3% (Fig. 9).ConclusionsThe DGN provides an effective data generation strategy for addressing the scarcity of ECG datasets. By supplying additional synthetic data, it enables convolutional networks to extract more diverse class-specific features, thereby improving recognition performance and reducing misidentification rates. Optimizing DGN with knowledge distillation further enhances efficiency, while maintaining SNR equivalence with the original DGN. This optimization reduces computational cost, conserves machine resources, and supports simultaneous task execution. Moreover, it enables the generation of new data without LOSS, allowing convolutional networks to learn from larger datasets at lower cost. Overall, the proposed approach markedly improves the classification performance of convolutional networks on ECG signals. Future work will focus on further algorithmic optimization for real-world applications.