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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.