The medical practitioners study the electrical activity of the human heart in order to detect heart diseases from the electrocardiogram (ECG) of the heart patients. A myocardial infarction (MI) or heart attack is a heart disease, that occurs when there is a block (blood clot) in the pathway of one or more coronary blood vessels (arteries) that supply blood to the heart muscle. The abnormalities in the heart can be identified by the changes in the ECG signal. The first step in the detection of MI is Preprocessing of ECGs which removes noise by using filters. Feature extraction is the next key process in detecting the changes in the ECG signals. This paper presents a method for extracting key features from each cardiac beat using Improved Bat algorithm. Using this algorithm best features are extracted, then these best (reduced) features are applied to the input of the neural network classifier. It has been observed that the performance of the classifier is improved with the help of the optimized features.

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a common type of arrhythmia that causes death in the adults .The Auto regressive (AR) coefficients characterize the features of AF. The AR coefficients are measured for every 15 second duration of the ECG and the features are extracted using Burg's method. These features are classified using the different statistical classifiers such as kernel Support Vector Machine (KSVM) and K- Nearest Neighbor (KNN). The performance of these classifiers is evaluated on signals obtained from MIT-BIH Atrial Fibrillation Database.The effect of AR model order and data length is tested on the classification results

Abnormal cardiac beat identification is a key process in the detection of heart diseases. Our present study describes a procedure for the detection of left and right bundle branch block (LBBB and RBBB) Electrocardiogram (ECG) patterns. The electrical impulses that control the cardiac beat face difficulty in moving inside the heart. This problem is termed as bundle branch block (BBB). BBB makes it harder for the heart to pump blood effectively through the heart circulatory system. ECG feature extraction is a key process in detecting heart ailments. Our present study comes up with a hybrid method combining two heuristic optimization methods: Bacterial Forging Optimization (BFO) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) for the feature selection of ECG signals. One of the major controlling forces of BFO algorithm is the chemotactic movement of a bacterium that models a test solution. The chemotaxis process of the BFO depends on random search directions which may lead to a delay in achieving the global optimum solution. The hybrid technique: Bacterial Forging–Particle Swarm Optimization (BFPSO) incorporates the concepts from BFO and PSO and it creates individuals in a new generation. This BFPSO method performs local search through the chemotactic movement of BFO and the global search over the entire search domain is accomplished by a PSO operator. The BFPSO feature values are given as the input for the Levenberg–Marquardt Neural Network classifier.