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An interpretable and explainable neural network to classify sports-related cardiac arrhythmias in professional football athletes

2026-03-02 sports medicine Title + abstract only
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Sudden cardiac death risk is 2-3-fold higher in athletes than in non-athletes. We classify sports-related cardiac arrhythmias using a novel explainability framework comprising data analysis, model interpretability, post-hoc visualisation, and systematic assessment. Two neural networks--one with interpretable sinc convolution and one with standard convolution--were trained on general-population ECGs (PhysioNet, n=88,253, 30 arrhythmias, three continents) and tested on professional footballers (PF...

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