Abstract

Body surface potential maps were investigated to identify a set of optimal recording sites required to discriminate between several diseases. Specifically, recordings captured from subjects exhibiting myocardial infarction or left ventricular hypertrophy, as well as a control group consisting of healthy subjects were investigated. Due to the fact that multi-class problems are inherently difficult to solve we divided the problem into several two-class scenarios. Six datasets were generated from the available 744 records, each viewing the available data differently, to form several two-class problems. A data-driven selection algorithm was applied to each of the generated datasets to produce six classification models, each utilising as features those recording sites offering most to the discrimination task being investigated. Subsequently, a framework was introduced to facilitate the combination of outputs from each classifier. Essentially, the framework used the outputs from half of the classification models to determine which of the remaining models would be employed to form a final decision. A benchmark, in the form of a multi-group classifier, was introduced to evaluate the perceived benefits of the proposed approach. An improvement of approximately 10% upon the benchmark was observed resulting in an overall accuracy of 79.19%.