Cardiovascular diseases, prevalent as leading health concerns, demand early diagnosis for effective risk prevention. Despite numerous diagnostic models, challenges persist in network configuration and performance degradation, impacting model accuracy. In response, this paper introduces the Optimally Configured and Improved Long Short-Term Memory (OCI-LSTM) model as a robust solution. Leveraging the Salp Swarm Algorithm, irrelevant features are systematically eliminated, and the Genetic Algorithm is employed to optimize the LSTM’s network configuration. Validation metrics, including the accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and F1 score, affirm the model’s efficacy. Comparative analysis with a Deep Neural Network and Deep Belief Network establishes the OCI-LSTM’s superiority, showcasing a notable accuracy increase of 97.11%. These advancements position the OCI-LSTM as a promising model for accurate and efficient early diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases. Future research could explore real-world implementation and further refinement for seamless integration into clinical practice.

Background: Cardiac arrhythmias are one of the leading causes of heart failure. In particular, atrial fibrillation (AFib) is a kind of arrhythmia that can lead to heart stroke and myocardial infarction. It is very important and crucial to predict AFib at an early stage to prevent heart disease. Electrocardiogram is one of the premium diagnostic tools which is used by most of the researchers for predicting irregular heartbeats. There are many works carried out in finding heart disease using machine learning classifiers. Aims and Objectives: Deep learning based hybrid Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) network is hybridized with Enhanced Whale Optimization (EWO) to minimize the network optimization and configuration issues faced in the existing models and proposed to increases the accuracy of predicting AFib. Materials and Methods: The proposed LSTM network is hybridized with a EWO technique for predicting AFib. This study uses a hybrid LSTM EWO network for classifying the various output labels of heart disease. EWO is used to predict the most relevant features from the raw dataset. Then, the LSTM model is used to predict the AFib of a patient from normal ECG data. Results: The DL based LSTM EWO achieves better results in all the performance metrics by analyzing the optimized features in feature space, training, and testing phase and successfully obtains better performance in an effective manner. LSTM improves the accuracy by reducing the number of units in the hidden layer which optimizes the network configuration. The proposed model achieves 96.12% accuracy which is 12.81% higher than RF, 15.01% higher than GB, 28.04% higher than CART, and 16.92% higher than SVM. Conclusion: The proposed model hybrid LSTM network integrated EWO for predicting the AFib. The EWO is applied for selecting the most appropriate features needed for the model to learn and produce improvised performance. The optimization and network configuration problems faced in the existing studies are avoided by choosing the suitable number of LSTM units and the size of the time window. This has been implemented through LSTM units and their window size. In addition, we made a statistical examination to prove the importance of proposed work against other models. It is observed that the experimental results attained with 96% of accuracy, better than conventional models.