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).

Self-supervised deep learning system that detects ECG anomalies indirectly, by learning to forecast what a normal ECG signal should look like next. FADE is trained only on normal ECG segments using a novel morphology-inspired loss function; at inference time, a large mismatch between the forecast and the observed signal flags an anomaly, avoiding the need for labeled abnormal-beat datasets. Evaluated on the public MIT-BIH NSR and MIT-BIH Arrhythmia databases, FADE reached an average accuracy of 83.84% for anomaly detection and 85.46% for correctly classifying normal ECG, and the approach can be adapted to new recording contexts via domain adaptation.

Multi-label 12-lead ECG diagnosis model submitted to the PhysioNet/Computing in Cardiology Challenge 2020, built on the same residual 1D CNN family as the authors' earlier Nature Communications model but retrained and validated across the challenge's large, multi-institutional pooled training set (CPSC2018, China 12-Lead ECG Database, St. Petersburg INCART, PTB and PTB-XL, and the Georgia 12-Lead ECG Database). The model uses an unsupervised pretraining stage -- predicting unseen samples of a partially masked ECG signal -- before supervised fine-tuning to jointly detect nine diagnostic classes (atrial fibrillation, first-degree AV block, left and right bundle branch block, normal rhythm, premature atrial/ventricular contraction, and ST-segment depression/elevation). The 2020 Challenge was notable for requiring every team to publicly release both their trained model weights and full training code, making this one of relatively few 12-lead ECG classifiers with an end-to-end reproducible public pipeline.

Unified deep-learning model for 12-lead ECG analysis that predicts a broad range of cardiac and non-cardiac discharge diagnoses coded under the ICD-10 classification system, evaluated as a unified screening tool for emergency departments where a single ECG could flag many potential conditions at once rather than one disease at a time. Introduces the MIMIC-IV-ECG-ICD-ED benchmark dataset (derived from MIMIC-IV and MIMIC-IV-ECG) and reports AUROC scores across diverse diagnostic scenarios (all discharge diagnoses vs. emergency-department-only diagnoses, cardiac vs. non-cardiac ICD-10 chapters), suggesting integration into emergency-department clinical decision-support systems.

Multimodal cardiac-sensing foundation model pretrained with generative masked pretraining on ECG, PPG, and paired clinical/machine-generated text reports from roughly 1.7 million individuals across three large-scale critical-care and outpatient ECG datasets. A channel-embedding scheme lets the same model accept any combination of 12-lead ECG, single-lead/wearable ECG, and PPG. The resulting embeddings transfer to diagnostic classification, demographic recognition, vital-sign measurement, clinical-outcome prediction, and ECG question answering. Pretrained weights require a signed academic-access agreement rather than an open download.

Supervised EfficientNetV2-based 12-lead ECG model trained on over 1 million ECGs from the Montreal Heart Institute to predict 77 cardiac conditions derived from American Heart Association recommendations, plus fine-tuned digital-biomarker heads for reduced LVEF, 5-year atrial-fibrillation risk, and long-QT-syndrome (LQTS) detection/genotyping. Validated on 881,403 ECGs across 11 geographically diverse cohorts (4 public, 7 private health systems), achieving AUROCs above 0.98 for the 77-condition interpretation task while being 60x smaller and 29x faster at inference than its self-supervised DeepECG-SSL counterpart, with up to 9.7x lower CO2 emissions on equivalent tasks.

Self-supervised EfficientNetV2-based 12-lead ECG foundation model pretrained via contrastive learning and masked-lead modeling on 1.9 million ECGs (Montreal Heart Institute plus CODE-15% and MIMIC-IV), then fine-tuned for the same 77-condition ECG interpretation task and digital-biomarker extraction as DeepECG-SL. Outperforms the supervised counterpart on label-scarce digital-biomarker tasks, with the largest gains on LQTS genotype classification (AUROC 0.931 vs. 0.850, n=127 ECGs) and 5-year atrial-fibrillation risk (AUROC 0.742 vs. 0.734, n=132,050 ECGs), and outperforms ECG-FM and ECGFounder on shared external diagnostic classes.

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.

Self-supervised ECG representation-learning method that adapts Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) -- originally developed for images -- to 1D electrocardiogram signals. A Vision Transformer encoder (ViT-XS/S/B) is pretrained to predict masked temporal segments of the ECG directly in latent feature space, using a masking strategy tailored to time-series, on more than 1 million ECGs pooled from MIMIC-IV-ECG, CODE-15%, PTB-XL, Chapman-Shaoxing, CPSC2018/Extra, Georgia, PTB, and St-Petersburg-INCART. After fine-tuning on PTB-XL, the ViT-S/JEPA model reaches 0.945 AUC on the all-statements diagnostic task, exceeding prior self-supervised ECG baselines including CPC and ST-MEM. Developed at the Zuse Institute Berlin.

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).

Patch-based masked-training framework for robust arrhythmia detection from digitized, multi-layout ECG images (e.g. 3x4, 2x6, 12x1 printed/scanned layouts), designed to handle the asynchronous lead timing and partial signal blackout that digitization introduces. An adaptive variable block-count masking strategy focuses model attention on key patches with cross-lead dependencies. Evaluated on PTB-XL digitized into multiple synthetic layouts and externally validated on 400 real digitized ECG images from Chaoyang Hospital, outperforming classical imputation baselines and the CNN foundation model ECGFounder.

ECG foundation model designed to remain accurate when leads are missing or signals are noisy. A 1D ConvNeXt V2 encoder is trained with a dual-mode self-distillation objective (separate lead-missing and noise "teachers") alongside contrastive alignment to detailed diagnostic-criteria text reports retrieved via a lightweight, LLM-free "Cardiac Feature Retrieval" module. Consistently ranks best or second-best across PTB-XL diagnostic tasks and MIT-BIH arrhythmia classification under original, noisy, lead-missing, and combined-corruption conditions. Developed by FPT Software AI Center and the University of Arkansas.

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.

ECG foundation model built on the xLSTM (extended LSTM) architecture: a bidirectional stack of nine alternating scalar- and matrix-memory LSTM blocks that scales linearly with sequence length, unlike the quadratic cost of transformer-based ECG models. Pretrained with SimDINOv2, a coding-rate-regularized self-distillation (DINO) objective adapted from computer vision to ECG time series, on roughly 8 million recordings from CODE, INCART, and Chapman-Shaoxing-Ningbo. Introduced alongside BenchECG, a standardized 8-dataset/10-task benchmark, on which xECG achieves the best average rank of any publicly available ECG foundation model, with particular strength on long-context tasks (30-minute ambulatory arrhythmia classification, multi-hour sleep-apnea segmentation) where transformer-based models are computationally limited.

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.

Single-lead ECG foundation model pretrained with clinically-guided contrastive learning: rather than relying on hand-labeled tasks, it uses routinely collected clinical metadata and risk scores from 161,000 MIMIC-IV-ECG patients as the training signal. Released in three sizes - Small (~448K parameters), Medium (30.7M), and Large (~296M) - and benchmarked against other ECG foundation models like ECGFounder across 18 tasks and 7 held-out datasets. Developed by Nokia Bell Labs.

Reconstructs digital 12-lead ECG waveforms from scanned or photographed paper printouts, using an nnU-Net image segmentation model to trace the signal pixels followed by a Hough-transform-based reconstruction pipeline. This is a digitization tool rather than a diagnostic model - it recovers a usable signal from a paper record rather than producing a diagnosis. Won the PhysioNet/Computing in Cardiology Challenge 2024; developed by a team at the University of Oxford.

Open ECG foundation model with 90.9M parameters, built on a wav2vec 2.0-style Transformer and pretrained on 1.25-1.5 million ECGs using a hybrid contrastive-and-generative self-supervised objective. Base pretrained weights and MIMIC-IV-ECG-finetuned downstream checkpoints are both released. Developed on the fairseq_signals framework by the University of Toronto / Vector Institute's Wang lab.

Large-scale ECG foundation model pretrained on more than 10 million recordings spanning 150 label categories from the Harvard-Emory ECG Database. Built as a general-purpose feature extractor that can be fine-tuned for arrhythmia detection, demographic inference, and event prediction, and externally validated on MIMIC-IV-ECG and PTB-XL. Also used as the pretrained backbone for downstream clinical models such as Pocket-K, a hyperkalemia detector. Developed by Peking University and Harvard-Emory researchers.

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.

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.

GPT-style decoder-only Transformer pretrained via next-token prediction on tokenized single-lead ECG time series, producing an interpretable general-purpose model that can be fine-tuned for tasks like arrhythmia screening and beat detection. Individual attention heads are shown to respond to physiologically meaningful features such as the P-wave, and token embeddings cluster by position in the cardiac cycle. A companion PPG-pretrained model (PPG-PT) is released in the same repository. Developed at Imperial College London.

Treats ECGs as a language: a QRS-Tokenizer converts raw waveforms into discrete heartbeat 'words' from a learned 8,192-entry vocabulary, and a spatio-temporal transformer (ST-ECGFormer) is pretrained via masked-sentence modeling over these tokens. Evaluated for robust, competitive performance across six public ECG datasets and published at ICLR 2025. Developed by Peking University's digital health group, pretrained on MIMIC-IV-ECG.

Self-supervised foundation model for 12-lead ECGs, pretrained on 9.1 million recordings covering 164 cardiovascular conditions across adult and pediatric cohorts, including single-lead settings. Uses a HuBERT-style Transformer encoder and can be fine-tuned with a simple output layer for diagnosis and event-prediction tasks. Released in small, base, and large (~183M parameter) configurations by researchers at the University of Brescia.

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.

Reference benchmark suite for the PTB-XL ECG dataset, providing pretrained xresnet1d, InceptionTime, LSTM, and CPC-pretrained models for 71-label, diagnostic, sub-diagnostic, and super-diagnostic classification of ECG findings. Widely used as a standardized baseline for comparing new ECG classification methods. Developed by Strodthoff et al. at Fraunhofer HHI.

Generative adversarial network that synthesizes realistic 10-second, 12-lead normal-sinus-rhythm ECGs from scratch, without using any real patient data at inference time, enabling privacy-preserving data sharing and augmentation. Uses a U-Net-style 1D deconvolutional generator with a WaveGAN-inspired discriminator. Outperformed a WaveGAN* baseline on the fraction of generated tracings classified as normal sinus rhythm by a commercial ECG interpretation algorithm. Developed by SimulaMet and Oslo Metropolitan University.

Diffusion-based generative model that synthesizes 12-lead ECGs conditioned on any of 71 PTB-XL diagnostic labels, combining a denoising diffusion process with a structured state-space (S4) sequence backbone. Outperformed GAN-based baselines (WaveGAN*, Pulse2Pulse) on both classifier-based fidelity metrics and a clinical Turing test. Developed at the University of Oldenburg.

Self-supervised ECG foundation model that adapts to varying lead combinations by patchifying 12-lead recordings across both space (leads) and time, then pretraining a ViT-B/75 encoder-decoder with a masked-autoencoder objective. Published at ICLR 2024 by VUNO Inc., and pretrained on the Chapman-Shaoxing-Ningbo dataset along with several other public 12-lead sources.