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)