Abstract
Cardiac conduction disease is a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. There is considerable clinical significance and an emerging need of early detection of these diseases for preventive treatment success before more severe arrhythmias occur. However, developing such early screening tools is challenging due to the lack of early electrocardiograms (ECGs) before symptoms occur in patients. Mouse models are widely used in cardiac arrhythmia research. The goal of this paper is to develop deep learning models to predict cardiac conduction diseases in mice using their early ECGs. We hypothesize that mutant mice present subtle abnormalities in their early ECGs before severe arrhythmias present. These subtle patterns can be detected by deep learning though they are hard to be identified by human eyes. We propose a deep transfer learning model, DeepMiceTL, which leverages knowledge from human ECGs to learn mouse ECG patterns. We further apply the Bayesian optimization and $k$-fold cross validation methods to tune the hyperparameters of the DeepMiceTL. Our results show that DeepMiceTL achieves a promising performance (F1-score: 83.8%, accuracy: 84.8%) in predicting the occurrence of cardiac conduction diseases using early mouse ECGs. This study is among the first efforts that use state-of-the-art deep transfer learning to identify ECG patterns during the early course of cardiac conduction disease in mice. Our approach not only could help in cardiac conduction disease research in mice, but also suggest a feasibility for early clinical diagnosis of human cardiac conduction diseases and other types of cardiac arrythmias using deep transfer learning in the future.