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.
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:2606. 02605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Coronary artery stenosis is a common cardiovascular disease, with severe, untreated cases posing significant risks of heart attack.
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).
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.
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.
The study investigates whether ECG representations derived from a β-variational autoencoder (VAE) can distinguish patients with myocardial scar (LGE+) from those without (LGE-) using routine ECG data. In a cohort of 300 cardiomyopathic patients, the β-VAE achieved an AUC of 0.577 (sensitivity 0.775) with Gradient Boosting, while the foundation ECGx.AI model reached an AUC of 0.686 with Random Forest. Dynamic Time Warping reconstruction errors differed significantly between classes in most leads and improved classification to an AUC of 0.643 with Logistic Regression, suggesting these errors could serve as markers of scar-related ECG changes.
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.
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.
A multicenter study developed an AI-enabled electrocardiography (AI-ECG) model that predicts vessel-specific hemodynamically significant stenosis using coronary computed tomographic angiography (CCTA) as the reference. The model demonstrated strong discrimination in internal and external cohorts, including normal ECGs, and produced low-, intermediate-, and high-risk strata that correlated with stenosis severity and major adverse cardiovascular events. Calibration, decision curve analyses, and integration with guideline-based pre-test probability showed clinical utility, while waveform and attribution analyses revealed physiologically meaningful ECG features linked to high-risk predictions.
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.
Cardiologists interpret electrocardiograms by localizing waveform components, measuring rhythm and interval patterns, and translating these structured observations into diagnostic evidence. Whether this expert reading process can serve as an effective prior for ECG agents remains unclear.
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.