Abstract
According to the World Health Organization, cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) account for an estimated 17.9 million deaths annually. CVDs refer to disorders of the heart and blood vessels such as arrhythmia, atrial fibrillation, congestive heart failure, and normal sinus rhythm. Early prediction of these diseases can significantly reduce the number of annual deaths. This study proposes a novel, efficient, and low-cost transformer-based algorithm for CVD classification. Initially, 56 features were extracted from electrocardiography recordings using 1,200 cardiac ailment records, with each of the four diseases represented by 300 records. Then, random forest was used to select the 13 most prominent features. Finally, a novel transformer-based algorithm has been developed to classify four classes of cardiovascular diseases. The proposed study achieved a maximum accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score of 0.9979, 0.9959, 0.9958, and 0.9959, respectively. The proposed algorithm outperformed all the existing state-of-the-art algorithms for CVD classification.