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.

Self-supervised deep learning model that extracts cardiovascular-risk-relevant patterns from multimodal polysomnography (PSG) signals -- EEG, ECG, and respiratory signals -- without relying on manual sleep-stage annotations. Trained on 4,398 participants, the model derives 'projection scores' by contrasting embeddings from individuals with and without cardiovascular disease (CVD) outcomes. Externally validated in an independent cohort of 1,093 participants, ECG-derived projection scores were predictive of prevalent and incident cardiac conditions (particularly CVD mortality), and combining projection scores with the Framingham Risk Score consistently improved prediction (AUC 0.607-0.965 internally, 0.710-0.807 externally across most outcomes).

Clinically-informed modification of the ResNet-18 architecture for identifying occlusion myocardial infarction (OMI) -- a severe, often ST-elevation-negative heart attack caused by complete blockage of a coronary artery -- from a single 12-lead ECG. The network first learns lead-specific temporal features via 1xk temporal convolutions, then learns cross-lead spatial concordance/discordance (e.g. reciprocal ST changes) via a 12x1 spatial convolution placed after the residual blocks, with saliency maps highlighting the most relevant leads and waveform regions for explainability. Benchmarked against ResNet-18 and other CNN/random-forest baselines on a multisite real-world clinical dataset of 10,893 ECGs (OMI rate 6.5%), reaching a test AUROC of 0.889 and an average precision of 0.587, outperforming the compared models.

Multimodal large language model for ECG medical-report generation and cardiology conversational question-answering. An ECG-CoCa encoder (contrastive ECG-report pretraining in the style of OpenCLIP) is paired with a LLaVA-style vision-language architecture and an LLM backbone, fine-tuned on a purpose-built 45k-example ECG-instruction dataset (19k diagnosis examples + 25k multi-turn dialogue examples) built from five public 12-lead ECG datasets. Produces free-text diagnostic reports and supports zero-shot ECG-report retrieval classification.

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).

Foundation model that encodes single-lead (lead I) ECGs with information from paired transthoracic echocardiography reports, aimed at label-efficient screening for structural heart disease (SHD) on wearable and portable single-lead ECG devices. A 7-layer 1D-CNN ECG encoder and a RoBERTa-based text encoder are contrastively pretrained (CLIP-style) on 194,551 ECG-echo report pairs from 77,378 adults in the Yale New Haven Health System, then the ECG encoder is fine-tuned on a temporally-distinct cohort to detect reduced LVEF, diastolic dysfunction, and a composite SHD label. Matches a randomly-initialized CNN at full training-data volume but substantially outperforms it in label-scarce regimes (e.g. with only 0.5% of labeled data).

Multi-agent LLM framework, deployed as a Software-as-a-Medical-Device on AWS, that assists cardiologists reading 24-hour Holter/patch ECG monitoring studies. Three fine-tuned LLM agents divide the diagnostic workflow the way a cardiologist would: a table-to-text agent (Llama-3.1-8B) extracts findings from tabular arrhythmia metrics, an image-to-text agent (LLaVA-v1.5-13B) extracts findings from ECG tracing images, and a findings-to-interpretation agent (Llama-3.1-8B) synthesizes both against clinical guidelines with a fact-checking step. Each agent is instruction-tuned on cardiologist-adjudicated reports from 2,000+ real-world patients and further steered at inference with in-context demonstrations matched to the patient's age, sex and arrhythmia class. In blinded cardiologist ratings across eight clinical/security metrics (1-5 scale), ZODIAC outperformed GPT-4o, Gemini-Pro, Llama-3.1-405B, Mixtral-8x22B, and medical-specialist LLMs (BioGPT, Meditron, Med42) on every metric while using under 30B total parameters, and has been integrated into commercial ECG monitoring devices. This is a proprietary product; no public code or model weights have been released.

Dual-encoder single-lead ECG classifier for atrial fibrillation detection that fuses a raw-signal branch with a spectrogram branch via axial attention and a Transformer. Originally developed as a graduate-course project at TU Darmstadt for the 2017 PhysioNet/CinC Challenge, and later extended in a 2023 follow-up study. Released in four sizes up to 130M parameters (S/M/L/XL), alongside a simpler CNN+LSTM variant.

Multimodal ECG model that pairs a 1D ConvNeXtV2 signal encoder with a BioLinkBERT text encoder, trained with a joint contrastive-and-captioning objective using LLM-generated descriptions of ECG demographics and waveform patterns in place of raw clinical reports. Validated on arrhythmia diagnosis and ECG-based subject identification, reaching an AUROC of 0.938 fine-tuned and 0.812 zero-shot on PTB-XL diagnostic classification. Developed at Rice University.

Detects 12 categories of echocardiogram-confirmed structural heart disease from 12-lead ECG waveforms combined with demographic and clinical covariates. Uses the same architecture as the original, larger EchoNext model but is trained entirely on the public EchoNext-Mini dataset - 100,000 de-identified ECGs from Columbia University Irving Medical Center released on PhysioNet - making it one of the more fully reproducible models of its kind, with public weights, a Docker image, and inference code.

Distills knowledge from EchoCLIP, a vision-language echocardiography model, into ECG embeddings, aiming to improve how well ECG signals alone can predict echo-derived measures of cardiac function. Combines a 1D ECG encoder with a BioBERT text encoder under a probabilistic cross-modal embedding objective that captures uncertainty. Published at MICCAI 2025 by the University of Toronto's McIntosh Lab.

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.

CLIP-style model that aligns 12-lead ECG signals with free-text echocardiography reports for zero-shot detection of structural heart disease directly from an ECG. Extends the MERL framework, and was trained on 45,016 paired ECG-echo reports from two Hong Kong hospitals, with external validation on the public EchoNext dataset from Columbia University. Developed by researchers at the University of Hong Kong and Imperial College London; described in a 2025 medRxiv preprint.