A Neuromorphic Processing System With Spike-Driven SNN Processor for Wearable ECG Classification

IEEE Trans Biomed Circuits Syst. 2022 Aug;16(4):511-523. doi: 10.1109/TBCAS.2022.3189364. Epub 2022 Oct 12.

Abstract

This paper presents a neuromorphic processing system with a spike-driven spiking neural network (SNN) processor design for always-on wearable electrocardiogram (ECG) classification. In the proposed system, the ECG signal is captured by level crossing (LC) sampling, achieving native temporal coding with single-bit data representation, which is directly fed into an SNN in an event-driven manner. A hardware-aware spatio-temporal backpropagation (STBP) is suggested as the training scheme to adapt to the LC-based data representation and to generate lightweight SNN models. Such a training scheme diminishes the firing rate of the network with little plenty of classification accuracy loss, thus reducing the switching activity of the circuits for low-power operation. A specialized SNN processor is designed with the spike-driven processing flow and hierarchical memory access scheme. Validated with field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) and evaluated in 40 nm CMOS technology for application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) design, the SNN processor can achieve 98.22% classification accuracy on the MIT-BIH database for 5-category classification, with an energy efficiency of 0.75 μJ/classification.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Computers
  • Electrocardiography
  • Neural Networks, Computer*
  • Wearable Electronic Devices*