arXiv Machine Learning

Beat-Synchronous Tokenization for ECG Transformers

arXiv AI
Sep 15

On the role of the tokenizer in ECG transformer models

The study investigates how different tokenization methods affect ECG Transformer models by comparing eight strategies across four backbone architectures on the CPSC2018 classification task. Physiology-aware tokenizations such as Median-beat and HeartLang achieve higher mean macro-AUCs (0.893 and 0.889) than point-wise and patch-wise approaches (0.822 and 0.824), while also reducing sequence length and training memory usage. Combining the two physiology-aware representations further improves macro-AUC by 8.2%.

By Jiawei Li, Fabio Bonassi, Johan Sundstr\"om, Thomas B. Sch\"on, Ant\^onio H. Ribeiro
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 AI
Sep 21

Learning Cardiac Features: ECG Biometrics Across Time and~Exercise

The study investigates ECG biometrics by training a Siamese ResNet with late multi-lead fusion on a large dataset from cardiopulmonary exercise tests. It evaluates the model under realistic conditions, including exercise-induced stress and cross-session variability, achieving an intra-session rest-to-peak EER of 1.7% and a state‑of‑the‑art 3.9% on the CYBHi dataset. The results demonstrate that an intrinsic cardiac signature remains robust to physiological and temporal drift.

By Luca Thiebaud (AMU, AMU SCI, DIAPRO, LIS), Paul Chauchat (AMU SCI, AMU, LIS, DIAPRO), Mustapha Ouladsine (AMU SCI, AMU, LIS, DIAPRO), St\'ephane Delliaux (AMU, APHM, C2VN)
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 12

ECGWmark: Deep Watermarking for Electrocardiogram Signals

ECGWmark is a fully convolutional, quantization‑free deep watermarking framework designed for electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. It embeds patient metadata into ECGs while preserving high‑frequency diagnostic details by operating in a continuous latent space and using a localized frame‑level mechanism to resist severe temporal desynchronization. A differentiable Physiological Loss guided by a clinical classifier helps maintain diagnostic semantics, achieving over 90% channel‑bit extraction accuracy under circular phase shifts and demonstrating mixed effects on class‑level diagnostic metrics in the MIT‑BIH benchmark.

By Kuan-Yu Chen, Kuan-Chen Wang, Yu Tsao, Jian-Jiun Ding
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
Sep 25

A Hybrid CNN--State-Space--Attention Backbone with Joint-Embedding Predictive Pretraining for 12-Lead ECG Classification

The paper presents a hybrid CNN–state‑space–attention backbone designed for 12‑lead ECG classification, combining early waveform tokenization, mixed temporal dynamics modeling, and late global attention. It introduces an ECG‑oriented Joint‑Embedding Predictive Pretraining (JEPA) that samples span masks at latent resolution and predicts clean latent targets via a momentum encoder, avoiding waveform reconstruction. Experiments on CPSC2018, Chapman‑Shaoxing, and PTB‑XL, with pretraining on ~350K unlabeled CODE‑15 recordings, demonstrate strong supervised baselines and improved transfer, especially in low‑label scenarios and with LoRA adaptation.

By Yakoub Bazi, Sarah Aljuhani, Mohamad M. Al Rahhal, Mansour Zuair, Naif Alajlan
arXiv AI
Aug 7

ECG-LENS: Lead-Aware Clinical Context Enriched ECG Report Generation and Evaluation

arXiv:2608. 05893v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Electrocardiography (ECG) is one of the most widely used non-invasive tools for diagnosing cardiovascular disease, but transforming multi-lead ECG recordings into reliable clinical reports remains challenging.

By Akanta Das, Tasinul Islam Ahon, Ahmed Mahir Sultan Rumi, Md Mahbubur Rahman, Tausif Amim Shadly, Tanzima Hashem