Predicting Patient Weight from Intracardiac Electrograms: A Study in Electrophysiological Signal Analysis

The analysis of electrophysiological signals from the human body has become increasingly crucial, especially given the widespread adoption of wearable technologies and the growing trend of remote and online monitoring. In situations where demographic patient data is unavailable, the evaluation of such information from electrophysiological signals becomes imperative for making well-informed diagnostic and therapeutic decisions, particularly in ambulatory and urgent cases. This study underscores the significance of this necessity by utilizing intracardiac electrograms to predict patient weight. Intracardiac electrograms were recorded from 44 patients (14 female, with an average age of 59.2{+/-}11.5 years) using a 64-pole basket catheter over a duration of 60 seconds. A dataset comprising 2,816 unipolar electrogram signal segments, each lasting 4 seconds, was utilized. Weight, considered as a continuous variable, underwent discretization into k bins with uniformly distributed widths, where various values of k were experimented with. As the value of k increases, class imbalance also increases. The state-of-the-art time series classification algorithm, Minirocket, was employed alongside the popular machine learning algorithm eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost). Minirocket consistently demonstrates superior performance compared to XGBoost across all class number scenarios and across all evaluation metrics, such as accuracy, F1 score, and Area Under the Curve (AUC) values, achieving scores of approximately 0.96. Conversely, XGBoost shows signs of overfitting, particularly noticeable in scenarios with higher class imbalance. Tuning probability thresholds for classes could potentially mitigate this issue. Additionally, XGBoosts performance improves with reduced bin numbers, emphasizing the importance of balanced classes. This study provides novel insights into the predictive capabilities of these algorithms and their implications for personalized medicine and remote health monitoring.