Screening for Chagas disease from the electrocardiogram using a deep neural network

by Carl Jidling, Daniel Gedon, Thomas B. Schön, Claudia Di Lorenzo Oliveira, Clareci Silva Cardoso, Ariela Mota Ferreira, Luana Giatti, Sandhi Maria Barreto, Ester C. Sabino, Antonio L. P. Ribeiro, Antônio H. Ribeiro

Worldwide, it is estimated that over 6 million people are infected with Chagas disease (ChD). It is a neglected disease that can lead to severe heart conditions in its chronic phase. While early treatment can avoid complications, the early-stage detection rate is low. We explore the use of deep neural networks to detect ChD from electrocardiograms (ECGs) to aid in the early detection of the disease.

We employ a convolutional neural network model that uses 12-lead ECG data to compute the probability of a ChD diagnosis. Our model is developed using two datasets which jointly comprise over two million entries from Brazilian patients: The SaMi-Trop study focusing on ChD patients, enriched with data from the CODE study from the general population. The model’s performance is evaluated on two external datasets: the REDS-II, a study focused on ChD with 631 patients, and the ELSA-Brasil study, with 13,739 civil servant patients.

Evaluating our model, we obtain an AUC-ROC of 0.80 (CI 95% 0.79-0.82) for the validation set (samples from CODE and SaMi-Trop), and in external validation datasets: 0.68 (CI 95% 0.63-0.71) for REDS-II and 0.59 (CI 95% 0.56-0.63) for ELSA-Brasil. In the latter, we report a sensitivity of 0.52 (CI 95% 0.47-0.57) and 0.36 (CI 95% 0.30-0.42) and a specificity of 0.77 (CI 95% 0.72-0.81) and 0.76 (CI 95% 0.75-0.77), respectively. Additionally, when considering only patients with Chagas cardiomyopathy as positive, the model achieved an AUC-ROC of 0.82 (CI 95% 0.77-0.86) for REDS-II and 0.77 (CI 95% 0.68-0.85) for ELSA-Brasil.

The neural network detects chronic Chagas cardiomyopathy (CCC) from ECG—with weaker performance for early-stage cases. Future work should focus on curating large higher-quality datasets. The CODE dataset, our largest development dataset includes self-reported and therefore less reliable labels, limiting performance for non-CCC patients. Our findings can improve ChD detection and treatment, particularly in high-prevalence areas.