arXiv AI

ELF: A Family of Encoder-Free ECG-Language Models

arXiv:2601. 18798v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: ECG-Language Models (ELMs) extend recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to automated ECG interpretation.

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 AI
Sep 16

Decoder Design Matters for ECG Delineation

The paper introduces R‑U‑Net, an ECG delineation model that combines a ResNet‑18 encoder with a U‑Net decoder. It demonstrates that this decoder design outperforms a ResNet‑18 + fully convolutional network baseline across 16 in‑domain settings and improves cross‑domain performance by 8.1 mIoU. Ablation studies reveal that the decoder contributes more to performance gains than the evaluated semi‑supervised learning methods.

By Joseph Scharpf, William Han, Chaojing Duan, Michael A. Rosenberg, Emerson Liu, Ding Zhao
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
Sep 17

NeuroECG: ECGFounder-Based Deep ECG Representation for EEG-Free Neurological Prognostication After Cardiac Arrest

NeuroECG is a deep learning framework that repurposes a pretrained ECG foundation model to predict neurological outcomes after cardiac arrest without using electroencephalography (EEG). The model fine‑tunes the backbone with a gradual unfreezing strategy on single‑channel bedside ECG, aggregates multiple ECG segments via quantile pooling and PCA, and achieves an AUROC of 0.7333 using ECG alone. When combined with static clinical covariates, NeuroECG improves performance to an AUROC of 0.8077 and an AUPRC of 0.8970, demonstrating that bedside ECG can serve as a low‑cost, auxiliary prognostic tool in an EEG‑free setting.

By Jiaju Gao, Yi Zhao, Chenyang Xu, Yuxi Zhou, Hao Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 7

MS-ECG-FM: Towards a More Universal Electrocardiogram Foundation Model for Health Monitoring using Multi-source Contrastive Learning

arXiv:2610.07662v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Electrocardiography (ECG) records the electrical activity of the heart, aiding diagnosis by detecting abnormalities in cardiac function. ECG foundation...

By Robert A. Lewis, I-Min Chiu, Kyle Verrier, Karthik Jayaraman Raghuram, Francoise Marvel, Salar Abbaspourazad, Anshuman Mishra, Guillermo Sapiro, Andrew C. Miller, Joseph Futoma
arXiv AI
Sep 15

MARCUS: An agentic, multimodal vision-language model for cardiac diagnosis and management

arXiv:2603.22179v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of global mortality, with progress hindered by human interpretation of complex cardiac tests. Curr...

By Jack W O'Sullivan, Mohammad Asadi, Lennart Elbe, Akshay Chaudhari, Tahoura Nedaee, Francois Haddad, Ivan Lopez, Fang Cao, Michael Salerno, Li Fe-Fei, Ehsan Adeli, Rima Arnaout, Euan A Ashley
arXiv AI
Aug 20

MedUAG: Unified Understanding and Generation for Medical Multimodal Models

The paper introduces MedUAG, a unified medical multimodal model that supports both understanding and generation tasks. It presents MedUAGCorpus, the largest dataset of over 6 million instances across 14 imaging modalities, and MedUAGBench, a benchmark covering 12 diverse generation tasks with standardized protocols. Experiments show that MedUAG performs strongly across many medical understanding and generation tasks, setting a competitive baseline for future medical multimodal systems.

By Zijie Meng, Yuncheng Zhang, Hualiang Wang, Yitian Tang, Xiaotang Gai, Chen Shen, Songtao Jiang, Shaosheng Cao, Jian Wu, Xian Wu, Zuozhu Liu
arXiv AI
Oct 1

Robust Transfer Learning for Paper ECG Recognition

RobECG-CL is a rank‑aware contrastive learning framework designed to learn robust representations for paper ECG images, which often suffer from varied layouts, physical artifacts, and limited labels. The method constructs progressively degraded views from standard 12‑lead ECG recordings and trains the model to maintain invariance to the same recording while respecting degradation ordering. In synthetic stress tests on CODE‑II and EchoNext, RobECG‑CL shows improved robustness under severe degradation and few‑shot transfer, outperforming other contrastive baselines and surpassing the waveform‑based foundation model ECG‑FM in a 1% labeled setting; it also achieves the best macro AUROC on 312 hospital samples with 37 labels.

By Yinghao Xie, Zhenbang Dai, Haojun Wang, Jinyu Cai, Fabio Bonassi, Hongwu Chen, Johan Sundstr\"om, Jiawei Li, Ant\^onio H. Ribeiro