FOCAL is a framework that aligns fine-grained ECG waveform segments with specific report tags using Optimal Transport, addressing the lack of localized representation in prior methods. It introduces a semantic similarity matrix to mitigate false negatives when reports share diagnoses, and a coarse‑to‑fine enrichment pipeline that employs Large Language Models to recover missing waveform semantics while filtering hallucinations. Experiments on six datasets show FOCAL achieves state‑of‑the‑art zero‑shot prediction and linear probing performance.
By Haitao Li, Che Liu, Zhengyao Ding, Ziyi Liu, Wenqi Shao, Zhengxing Huang
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: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
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
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: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