Abstract: Objective We propose a parallel neural network classification method to improve the performance of classification of 4 types of arrhythmias: normal beat, supraventricular ectopic beat, ventricular ectopic beat and fused beat. Methods Preprocessing was performed including denoising of ECG signal, segmentation of small-scale heartbeat and large-scale heartbeat and data enhancement. Based on deep learning theory, densely connected convolutional network was applied to improve the limitation of waveform feature extraction, and bidirectional long short-term memory network and efficient channel attention network were combined to enhance the function of time series features and important features of the waveform. The parallel network structure was adopted, and the waveform features of small- scale heartbeat and large-scale heartbeat were input to improve the accuracy of arrhythmia classification at the same time. Softmax was used to carry out the 4 classification tasks of arrhythmia by the parallel network model. Results The proposed method was verified using MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database and 3 groups of experiments. The experiments for comparing the classification performance of multiple parallel network models and that of each classification model under different heartbeat input methods showed that the proposed classification model had an overall accuracy, average sensitivity and average specificity of 99.36% , 96.08% and 99.41%, respectively. Convergence performance analysis of the parallel network classification model showed that the training time of the classification model was 41 s. Conclusion The parallel multi-network classification method can improve the average sensitivity, specificity and training time while maintaining a high overall accuracy, and may thus provide a new technical solution for clinical diagnosis of arrhythmia.

Key words: arrhythmia; parallel classification; deep learning; network model