University Medical Center Gottingen (Maurer, Spicher, Hauschild et al.)
Open-source, reproducible pipeline for representing 12-lead ECGs as explicit graphs -- nodes per lead-timepatch, with edges encoding established inter-lead spatial relationships (fully-connected limb- and chest-lead subgraphs bridged via leads I, aVF, V4, and V5) -- and classifying them with a Graph Convolutional Network, paired with GNNExplainer to surface which leads and lead-pairs drove each prediction. Evaluated on PTB-XL for five-class diagnostic superclass classification (AUC 0.86) and, with the same architecture, on anteroseptal-vs-inferior myocardial-infarction localization (AUC 0.92), externally validated on the population-based SHIP cohort (AUC 0.87). Explainability analysis showed the GNN's lead attention recovers standard ECG diagnostic criteria (e.g. V1-V3 for anteroseptal MI, II/III/aVF for inferior MI). Developed at University Medical Center Gottingen; code and an example trained checkpoint are released under CC BY-NC 4.0.
Architecture
Graph neural network
Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) over an explicit 12-lead ECG graph (limb-lead and chest-lead fully-connected subgraphs bridged via I/aVF/V4/V5, with temporal patch nodes per lead); paired with GNNExplainer for post-hoc explainability
Framework
PyTorch
Added to catalog
2026-08-10
CC BY-NC 4.0
License for model weights only. Associated code may be licensed seperately, check code source for specific terms.
52% male / 48% female; age range 0-95 (median ~62). 21,837 10-second 12-lead ECG records.
Population-based cohort study in north-eastern Germany (SHIP-0 to SHIP-3, SHIP-TREND-0/1) with 12-lead ECG acquisition; the MI-localization external validation subset used 195 IMI cases, 239 AMI cases, and 239 age/sex-matched controls.
Diagnostic superclass classification (NORM / MI / STTC / CD / HYP) from a 12-lead ECG graph
Myocardial infarction localization/subtype classification (e.g. anteroseptal vs inferior MI) from a 12-lead ECG graph, externally validated on the SHIP cohort