Vocational School of Justice
EARLY WARNING SYSTEM FOR HEART DISEASE DETECTION
A system, which will be able to detect heart diseases through electrocardiogram (ECG) signals “beforehand”, has been developed. Assoc. Prof. Dr. Türker İnce, Head of Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Izmir University of Economics (IUE), developed a monitoring and advance warning system for heart diseases together with Prof. Dr. Moncef Gabbouj, Professor of Signal Processing at the Department of Signal Processing, Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Finland, and Prof. Dr. Serkan Kıranyaz, Department of Electrical Engineering, Qatar University.
Assoc. Prof. Dr. İnce reported that they developed an early detection system, which will detect possible heart diseases by using the ECG signals of healthy individuals by applying the new techniques they recommended in signal processing and machine learning fields. He stated that they applied for an international patent for their study and that it was published in “Nature - Scientific Reports” journal, an academically recognized scientific journal.
Each year more than 7 million people die from heart diseases, yet no robust solution exists today to detect such heart anomalies right at the moment they occur despite the high-tech ECG monitoring and diagnostic device, indicated Assoc. Prof. Dr. İnce. He said that they designed a personalized health monitoring system that can detect early occurrences of arrhythmias from an individual’s electrocardiogram (ECG) signal for effective treatment. “Studies so far compared heartbeats of healthy individuals with the existing ECG data of unhealthy individuals. However, since the ECG signals of healthy individuals may display anomalies and formal variabilities, such modeling or learning techniques are not always used successfully. In the recommended new approach, the cardiac arrhythmias are artificially modelled in signaling area, making synthesizing the possibly unhealthy ECG signals of a healthy individual possible, and thus providing heart monitoring and early detection system for a real individual,” said Dr. İnce.
‘Instant feedback in mobile devices’
Assoc. Prof. Dr. İnce stated that the system solution, which is able to imitate the early detection capabilities of specialized cardiologist in performance tests administered on frequently used ECG databases, would be used on mobile devices in real time heart monitoring purposes. He said that even though the person does not have any cardiac diseases, the system would give a warning in the event of any changes in heartbeat of the person.