Deep learning strategy for cost-effective, comprehensive cardiac screening from ECG alone, by transferring domain-specific structural information from cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging into ECG representations. Combines multimodal contrastive learning with masked data modelling during pretraining on paired ECG-CMR data, then uses only ECG at inference. On 40,044 UK Biobank subjects, the multimodal pretraining improved subject-specific CVD risk prediction by up to 12.19% and cardiac phenotype prediction by up to 27.59% versus ECG-only baselines, with learned ECG representations shown to incorporate information from CMR regions of interest.

First multimodal LLM to unify ECG time series, 12-lead ECG images, and text for grounded, clinician-aligned ECG interpretation. A dual-encoder framework (ECG-CoCa time-series encoder plus a LLaVA-style vision-language backbone) extracts complementary time-series and image features with cross-modal alignment, trained on knowledge-guided instruction data (ECG-Grounding, linking diagnoses to measurable waveform parameters such as QRS/PR intervals) plus the 1.15-million-conversation ECG-Instruct corpus. Introduces the "Grounded ECG Understanding" benchmark and improves predictive performance, explainability, and grounding over prior ECG-language models such as ECG-Chat and PULSE.

Multi-scale ECG-language pretraining model that aligns 12-lead ECG signals with clinical text reports at three granularities -- token, beat, and rhythm level -- rather than a single global embedding. First fine-tunes a cardiology-specialized text encoder to improve understanding of ECG report language, then trains an ECG-FM-initialized ECG encoder against it with hierarchical contrastive supervision. Outperforms prior ECG-language and self-supervised baselines including MERL, ST-MEM, and HeartLang on zero-shot classification, linear probing, and ECG report generation, with especially large gains at low label fractions. Developed at the University of Hong Kong (HKU-MedAI).

Multimodal cardiac MRI foundation model that fuses 3D+T cine CMR (short-axis and long-axis views) with tabular patient health records (demographics, metabolic, and lifestyle factors) from 42,000 UK Biobank participants. Two-stage self-supervised pretraining -- masked-image reconstruction, then imaging-tabular contrastive alignment -- produces representations that transfer to whole-heart segmentation, cardiac phenotype/physiological-feature regression, and cardiac/metabolic disease classification within one unified framework.

Vision-language model that jointly embeds a cardiac MRI study, treated as video, with the impression section of its clinical report. Combines a video encoder over cine/LGE frame sequences with a Bio+ClinicalBERT text encoder using CLIP-style contrastive training. Supports zero-shot and few-shot classification of cardiomyopathies, amyloidosis, and LV dysfunction, plus image/report retrieval and structured report drafting. Trained on a private, single-institution corpus of roughly 11,000-14,000 CMR study-report pairs from Cleveland Clinic and Case Western.

Multimodal model that learns a shared representation space for ECG signals and their clinical text reports, pretrained on paired MIMIC-IV-ECG recordings and reports. Supports zero-shot ECG classification via text prompts, tested across six public benchmark datasets including PTB-XL and CPSC2018 without any downstream training data. Developed at Imperial College London and published at ICML 2024.