  Evaluating canine electrocardiograms (ECG) require skilled veterinarians, but
current availability of veterinary cardiologists for ECG interpretation and
diagnostic support is limited. Developing tools for automated assessment of ECG
sequences can improve veterinary care by providing clinicians real-time results
and decision support tools. We implement a deep convolutional neural network
(CNN) approach for classifying canine electrocardiogram sequences as either
normal or abnormal. ECG records are converted into 8 second Lead II sequences
and classified as either normal (no evidence of cardiac abnormalities) or
abnormal (presence of one or more cardiac abnormalities). For training ECG
sequences are randomly augmented using RandomAugmentECG, a new augmentation
library implemented specifically for this project. Each chunk is then is
converted using a continuous wavelet transform into a 2D scalogram. The 2D
scalogram are then classified as either normal or abnormal by a binary CNN
classifier. Experimental results are validated against three boarded veterinary
cardiologists achieving an AUC-ROC score of 0.9506 on test dataset matching
human level performance. Additionally, we describe model deployment to
Microsoft Azure using an MLOps approach. To our knowledge, this work is one of
the first attempts to implement a deep learning model to automatically classify
ECG sequences for canines.Implementing automated ECG classification will
enhance veterinary care through improved diagnostic performance and increased
clinic efficiency.
