Designing ECG Monitoring Healthcare System with Federated Transfer Learning and Explainable AI

Deep learning plays a vital role in classifying different arrhythmias using electrocardiography (ECG) data. Nevertheless, training deep learning models normally requires a large amount of data and can lead to privacy concerns. Unfortunately, a large amount of healthcare data cannot be easily collected from a single silo. Additionally, deep learning models are like black-box, with no explainability of the predicted results, which is often required in clinical healthcare. This limits the application of deep learning in real-world health systems.

In this paper, to address the above-mentioned challenges, we design a novel end-to-end framework in a federated setting for ECG-based healthcare using explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) and deep convolutional neural networks (CNN). The federated setting is used to solve challenges such as data availability and privacy concerns. Furthermore, the proposed framework effectively classifies different arrhythmias using an autoencoder and a classifier, both based on a CNN. Additionally, we propose an XAI-based module on top of the proposed classifier for interpretability of the classification results, which helps clinical practitioners to interpret the predictions of the classifier and to make quick and reliable decisions. The proposed framework was trained and tested using the baseline Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Boston's Beth Israel Hospital (MIT-BIH) Arrhythmia database. The trained classifier outperformed existing work by achieving accuracy up to 94.5% and 98.9% for arrhythmia detection using noisy and clean data, respectively, with five-fold cross-validation. We also propose a new communication cost reduction method to reduce the communication costs and to enhance the privacy of users' data in the federated setting. While the proposed framework was tested and validated for ECG classification, it is general enough to be extended to many other healthcare applications.