Using temporal abduction for biosignal interpretation: A case study on QRS detection

Abstract: In this work, we propose an abductive framework for biosignal interpretation, based on the concept of Temporal Abstraction Patterns. A temporal abstraction pattern defines an abstraction relation between an observation hypothesis and a set of observations constituting its evidence support. New observations are generated abductively from any subset of the evidence of a pattern, building an abstraction hierarchy of observations in which higher levels contain those observations with greater interpretative value of the physiological processes underlying a given signal. Non-monotonic reasoning techniques have been applied to this model in order to find the best interpretation of a set of initial observations, permitting even to correct these observations by removing, adding or modifying them in order to make them consistent with the available domain knowledge. Some preliminary experiments have been conducted to apply this framework to a well known and bounded problem: the QRS detection on ECG signals. The objective is not to provide a new better QRS detector, but to test the validity of an abductive paradigm. These experiments show that a knowledge base comprising just a few very simple rhythm abstraction patterns can enhance the results of a state of the art algorithm by significantly improving its detection F1-score, besides proving the ability of the abductive framework to correct both sensitivity and specificity failures.