Cardiovascular disease identification using a hybrid CNN-LSTM model with explainable AI

Abstract

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a leading cause of death worldwide, with millions dying each year. The identification and early diagnosis of CVD are critical in preventing adverse health outcomes. Hence, this study proposes a hybrid deep learning (DL) model that combines a convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) to identify CVD from the clinical data. This study utilizes CNN to extract the relevant features from the input data and the LSTM network to process sequential data and capture dependencies and patterns over time. This study provides insights into the potential of a hybrid DL model combined with feature engineering and explainable AI to improve the accuracy and interpretability of CVD prediction. We evaluated our model on a publicly available dataset where the proposed CNN-LSTM achieved a high accuracy of 73.52% and 74.15% with and without feature engineering, respectively, in identifying individuals with CVD, which is the best result compared to the current state-of-the-art model. The results of this study demonstrate the potential of DL models for the early diagnosis of CVD. Our proposed CNN-LSTM model also incorporates explainable AI to identify the top features responsible for CVD. They could be used to develop more effective screening tools in clinical practice.