Team NIMA from ENTC wins 3rd place in Physionet/CinC Challenge 2021
Nima L. Wickramasinghe from the Department of Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering (ENTC), together with his mentor Mohamed Athif from the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Boston University (previously an undergraduate at ENTC) has won the 3rd place in 3 categories (All-lead, 3-lead, 2-lead) in the Physionet/Computing in Cardiology Challenge 2021.
PhysioNet supports challenges, which invite participants from all over the world from various institutes to tackle clinically interesting questions that are either unsolved or not well-solved. In cooperation with the Computing in Cardiology conference, PhysioNet has been co-hosting a challenge annually. This year, the conference was held in Brno, Czech Republic from 12th to 15th of September in a hybrid manner. Computing in Cardiology (formerly Computers in Cardiology) is an international scientific conference that has been held annually since 1974. CinC provides a forum for scientists and professionals from the fields of medicine, physics, engineering, and computer science to discuss their current research in topics pertaining to computing in clinical cardiology and cardiovascular physiology.
This year’s challenge was to identify Cardiac abnormalities (26 scored) given the ECG data of the patients. Usually, the ECG data consists of the signals from the 12-leads. But, this year’s challenge focused on whether the same accuracy can be achieved using reduced-lead ECG data. Using a smaller number of leads would enable low-cost, portable, and user-friendly point of care devices.
The team (team NIMA) proposed a novel solution to tackle this Multi-label classification problem by creating a Deep convolutional neural network that used the time domain and frequency domain of the ECG signals to classify the 26 scored cardiac abnormalities. The results showed that reduced-lead ECG data can obtain almost the same accuracy obtained using all leads.
The team was able to obtain 3rd place in the All-lead, 3-lead, and 2-lead categories competing against 39 International teams. The 2nd place was obtained by team DSAIL_SNU, mainly from Seoul National University. And, the 1st place was obtained by team ISIBrno-AIMT, mainly from the Institute of Scientific Instruments of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Brno, Czech Republic.
Remarks: The collaboration between Nima L. Wickramasinghe and Athif Mohamed was facilitated by the ScholarX program from the Sustainable Education Foundation. ScholarX is a 6-month program for Sri-Lankan undergraduates who would like to get free premium mentoring during their study period.
Link to challenge: https://physionetchallenges.org/2021/
Link to video: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nima-wickramasinghe-9b71a1205_innovation-research-activity-6844151633757171712–afB