arXiv Machine Learning

Do ECG Foundation Models Transfer to Rare Cardiac Diseases? Evidence from Brugada Syndrome Detection

arXiv:2607. 03009v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Background: Foundation models (FMs) trained on large-scale unlabeled physiological data have emerged as a promising paradigm for medical artificial intelligence.

arXiv AI
Sep 10

Leveraging Cardiac Imaging to Improve ECG-Based Detection of Chagas Disease in Resource-Constrained Settings

The study demonstrates that contrastive pre‑training of ECG representations using cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging data can enhance ECG‑based detection of Chagas disease. By aligning an ECG encoder with a CMR embedding space from 63,193 paired UK Biobank examinations, the authors achieved higher AUROC and sensitivity metrics on CODE‑15%, SaMi‑Trop, and PhysioNet/CinC 2025 Challenge datasets compared to an unaligned baseline. The approach shows that imaging‑supervised ECG representations generalize across different populations and resource‑constrained settings.

By Laura Alvarez-Florez, Daniel Uyterlinde, Samuel Ruip\'erez-Campillo, Lukas P. A. Arts, Folkert W. Asselbergs, Fleur V. Y. Tjong
arXiv AI
Aug 5

FOUND-AF: Benchmarking ECG Foundation Models for Atrial Fibrillation Detection

arXiv:2608. 03597v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common sustained cardiac arrhythmia and is associated with increased risks of stroke, heart failure, and mortality.

By Amirhossein Taleshinosrati, Yangyang Wang, Atitaya Phoemsuk, Vahid Abolghasemi, Naser Hossein Motlagh, Sadasivan Puthusserypady, Daniel Teichmann, Abdolrahman Peimankar
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

ECG-InterpBench: Benchmarking the Interpretability of ECG Foundation Models with Matched-Scale Sparse Autoencoders

arXiv:2607. 27404v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing benchmarks for electrocardiogram foundation models primarily evaluate downstream predictive performance, providing limited insight into whether their internal representations can be faithfully decomposed, clinically interpreted, or reproduced across independent analyses.

By Yixuan Duan, Wei Qiu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

A Dataset and Benchmarks for Atrial Fibrillation Detection from Electrocardiograms of Intensive Care Unit Patients

The paper presents a new labelled ICU dataset and benchmarks for detecting atrial fibrillation (AF) from electrocardiograms (ECGs). It compares three AI approaches—feature‑based classifiers, deep learning, and ECG foundation models—across Canadian ICU data and the 2021 PhysioNet challenge, finding that ECG foundation models with transfer learning achieve the highest F1 score (0.89). The study demonstrates the feasibility of automated AF monitoring in ICU settings and provides resources for further research.

By Sarah Nassar, Nooshin Maghsoodi, Sophia Mannina, Shamel Addas, Stephanie Sibley, Gabor Fichtinger, David Pichora, David Maslove, Purang Abolmaesumi, Parvin Mousavi
arXiv AI
Jul 7

ImputeECG: Deep Learning Reconstruction of Complete 12-Lead Electrocardiograms from Incomplete Recordings for Cardiac Assessment

arXiv:2607. 05009v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Complete digital 12-lead electrocardiograms (ECGs) are essential for AI-enabled cardiovascular assessment, yet many clinical ECG records, particularly those digitized from ECG images, remain incomplete because of short display formats, incomplete waveform digitization, lead loss, or signal corruption.

By Xiaocheng Fang, Haoyu Wang, Jieyi Cai, Qinghao Zhao, Jun Li, Shanwei Zhang, Guangkun Nie, Yujie Xiao, Shun Huang, Jiarui Jin, Hongmin Liu, Guodong Wang, Shuohua Chen, Liming Lin, Shouling Wu, Hongyan Li, Shenda Hong
arXiv Computer Vision
6d ago

Towards Whole-Study Screening for Congenital Heart Disease in Fetal Ultrasound Using Multiple Instance Learning

The paper presents a two‑stage framework for prenatal congenital heart disease (CHD) screening that operates directly on whole fetal ultrasound studies. It first learns transferable frame representations via self‑supervised masked‑autoencoder pre‑training, then identifies cardiac frames with a disease‑robust module and aggregates them using a transformer‑based multiple instance learning model to produce a case‑level diagnosis. The approach achieves high performance (AUC 0.985, specificity 0.990) on an internal test set and, after label‑free CORAL adaptation, improves to an AUC of 0.944 on an external cohort, outperforming existing baselines.

By Mohamed Azzam, Ruobing Liu, Esther C. Ugwueke, Ziyang Xu, Shibiao Wan, Alex Foy, Abraham Zabih, Jason Christensen, Neil Hamill, Ling Li, Jieqiong Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 21

BEAT-Net: Injecting Biomimetic Spatio-Temporal Priors for Interpretable ECG Diagnosis

BEAT-Net is a supervised biomimetic framework for ECG diagnosis that incorporates QRS-centered tokenization and a hierarchical architecture mirroring a cardiologist’s workflow. It processes heartbeat sequences through morphological, spatial, temporal, and transformer-based stages, achieving an AUC of 0.924 on large benchmarks while using only 0.7 million parameters. The model outperforms the 39.5‑million‑parameter HeartLang foundation model on morphological form classification and demonstrates superior cross‑dataset generalization with only 35% of the training data.

By Runze Ma, Haonan Lyu, Shunbo Jia, Qiang Yang, Muzi Xu, Jiaqi Zhang, Zihe Luo, Caizhi Liao
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

ECGQuest: Benchmarking and Fine-Tuning Language Models for Electrocardiography

ECGQuest is a new benchmark that evaluates language models on the contextual knowledge required for electrocardiogram interpretation, featuring 10,904 True/False questions derived from 23 ECG references and 2003‑2025 Computing in Cardiology proceedings. The study tested 23 commercial and open‑source models, finding that zero‑shot accuracy ranged from 49.5% to 74.4% and that fine‑tuning with Low‑Rank Adaptation improved all open‑source models by 6.5–14.1%, with the best fine‑tuned model achieving 76.3% accuracy and a five‑model ensemble reaching 78.5%. ECGQuest demonstrates that parameter‑efficient fine‑tuning can enable smaller models to compete with larger commercial ones on ECG‑specific tasks.

By Mohammadsina Hassannia, Matthew A. Reyna, Reza Sameni
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 20

Knowledge-Guided Cross-Modal Fusion for Adult-to-Pediatric ECG Transfer via Label-Conditioned Contrastive Alignment

arXiv:2607. 15928v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adult and pediatric electrocardiogram (ECG) interpretation relies on age-sensitive criteria, and models pretrained mainly on adult ECGs often transfer poorly to pediatric populations when pediatric labels are scarce.

By Xinran Liu, Yuwen Li, Hongxiang Gao, Heyang Xu, Jianqing Li, Zongmin Wang, Chengyu Liu
arXiv AI
Aug 11

FoMoH: A clinically meaningful foundation model evaluation for structured electronic health records

arXiv:2505. 16941v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Foundation models (FMs) promise to address core limitations of traditional supervised machine learning: (i) reliance on large amounts of labeled data, (ii) task specificity, and (iii) poor transportability.

By Vincent Jeanselme, Zilin Jing, Aparajita Kashyap, Chao Pang, Florent Pollet, Young Sang Choi, Xinzhuo Jiang, Yuta Kobayashi, Yanwei Li, Sara Matijevic, Karthik Natarajan, Shalmali Joshi