ALFRED: Ask a Large-language model For Reliable ECG Diagnosis

Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for analyzing medical data, particularly Electrocardiogram (ECG), offers high accuracy and convenience. However, generating reliable, evidence-based results in specialized fields like healthcare remains a challenge, as RAG alone may not suffice. We propose a Zero-shot ECG diagnosis framework based on RAG for ECG analysis that incorporates expert-curated knowledge to enhance diagnostic accuracy and explainability. Evaluation on the PTB-XL dataset demonstrates the framework's effectiveness, highlighting the value of structured domain expertise in automated ECG interpretation. Our framework is designed to support comprehensive ECG analysis, addressing diverse diagnostic needs with potential applications beyond the tested dataset.

Text-to-ECG: 12-Lead Electrocardiogram Synthesis conditioned on Clinical Text Reports

Electrocardiogram (ECG) synthesis is the area of research focused on generating realistic synthetic ECG signals for medical use without concerns over annotation costs or clinical data privacy restrictions. Traditional ECG generation models consider a single ECG lead and utilize GAN-based generative models. These models can only generate single lead samples and require separate training for each diagnosis class. The diagnosis classes of ECGs are insufficient to capture the intricate differences between ECGs depending on various features (e.g. patient demographic details, co-existing diagnosis classes, etc.). To alleviate these challenges, we present a text-to-ECG task, in which textual inputs are used to produce ECG outputs. Then we propose Auto-TTE, an autoregressive generative model conditioned on clinical text reports to synthesize 12-lead ECGs, for the first time to our knowledge. We compare the performance of our model with other representative models in text-to-speech and text-to-image. Experimental results show the superiority of our model in various quantitative evaluations and qualitative analysis. Finally, we conduct a user study with three board-certified cardiologists to confirm the fidelity and semantic alignment of generated samples. our code will be available at https://github.com/TClife/text_to_ecg