arXiv AI

ECG Mirage: Revealing and Mitigating the Underutilisation of ECGs in Vision-Language Models for Clinical Prediction

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

From ECG Signals to Representative-Morphology Heatmaps for Biometric Recognition

The paper introduces representative‑morphology heatmaps, a deterministic ECG‑to‑image representation that averages the five beats closest to the block mean within each ten‑beat block, producing either a conventional trace or a dense cardiac‑time‑by‑lead heatmap. Experiments on PTB, ECG‑ID, and MIMIC‑IV‑ECG‑DEMO show that heatmaps consistently improve verification and identification performance across 15 compact models, reducing EER by an average of 9.59 percentage points and increasing Rank‑1 by 24.69 points. The study also demonstrates that ImageNet initialization benefits multilead datasets, that performance does not scale monotonically with model size, and that useful channel combinations vary by cohort and biometric task.

By Athanasios Angelakis, Marta Gomez-Barrero
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 21

ECG-LLM: Foundation Model for ECG-Based Cardiac Reasoning

arXiv:2607. 16323v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Electrocardiography (ECG) is an inexpensive, standard-of-care test for cardiac symptoms, but front-line triage often lacks immediate access to definitive imaging such as echocardiography (ECHO) or cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR).

By Alexander Selivanov, Friederike Jungmann, Jan Kehrer, Karl-Ludwig Laugwitz, Eimo Martens, Daniel Rueckert
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

Diagnosing as Cardiologists Do: ECG Agents with Doctor-Grounded Priors for Clinical Reasoning Across Diseases and Populations

arXiv:2608. 09053v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cardiologists interpret electrocardiograms by localizing waveform components, measuring rhythm and interval patterns, and translating these structured observations into diagnostic evidence.

By Hongxiang Gao, He-yang Xu, Yuwen Li, Minghui Zhao, Zhipeng Cai, Xingyao Wang, Chenxi Yang, Jianqing Li, Chengyu Liu
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
arXiv AI
Jul 24

Enhancing Explainable Cardiac Diagnosis with Guide-Grounded Multimodal LLMs

arXiv:2607. 20814v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The electrocardiogram (ECG) is a cornerstone of cardiac as- sessment, yet clinical deployment of deep learning models remains con- strained by limited interpretability and the hallucination risk of large language models (LLMs).

By Hai-Nam Duy Vuong, Duy-Anh Bui, Trong-Nghia Nguyen, Kim-Ngan Thi Nguyen, Trang Mai Xuan, Tien-Cuong Nguyen, Van-Dem Pham, Thien Van Luong
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
Jun 30

IMCBench: A benchmark for multimodal LLMs in Image-grounded Medical Conversations

arXiv:2606. 28556v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in large language models and vision-language models have enabled reasoning over multimodal data, offering opportunities for clinical applications such as decision support and triaging.

By Maria Xenochristou, Ashutosh Joshi, Korosh Vatanparvar, Mohammad Abuzar Hashemi, Prasad Kasu, Deepak Bansal, Anchal Nema, Nivedita Wadhwa, Prashams S Jain, Rebecca Abraham, Will Kimbrough, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Wilko Schulz-Mahlendorf
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

MVC-Bench: Benchmarking Calibration of Medical Vision-Language Models

MVC-Bench is a new benchmark designed to evaluate the calibration of vision‑language models (VLMs) and medical VLMs (Medical‑VLMs) for medical image classification. It tests calibration across robustness to modality, backbone, and domain shift; effectiveness of calibration strategies and prompt‑tuning methods; and stability under prompt‑template and random‑seed variations. The benchmark includes eight backbones, three medical modalities (fundus imaging, histopathology, chest X‑ray), and compares post‑hoc, train‑time, and zero‑shot calibration approaches, reporting accuracy, Expected Calibration Error (ECE), Maximum Calibration Error (MCE), and Adaptive Calibration Error (ACE) over 1,638 experiments, while also proposing a Multi‑Class Margin (MCM) regularization technique that improves ECE in most settings.

By Ashshak Sharifdeen, Shihab Aaqil Ahamed, Ufaq Khan, Muhammad Akhtar Munir Sujair Ibrahim, Mohamed Rafeek Mareer Ahamed, Yutong Xie, Imran Razzak, Muhammad Haris Khan
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