Learning General Representation of 12-Lead Electrocardiogram with a Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture
This work addresses the problem of data scarcity in medical ECG analysis for researchers and clinicians, offering a novel self-supervised approach that is incremental in improving representation learning for this specific domain.
The paper tackles the challenge of learning general representations from 12-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) data with limited labeled samples by introducing ECG-JEPA, a self-supervised model that uses masked modeling in latent space and achieves state-of-the-art performance in downstream tasks like classification and feature prediction.
Electrocardiogram (ECG) captures the heart's electrical signals, offering valuable information for diagnosing cardiac conditions. However, the scarcity of labeled data makes it challenging to fully leverage supervised learning in medical domain. Self-supervised learning (SSL) offers a promising solution, enabling models to learn from unlabeled data and uncover meaningful patterns. In this paper, we show that masked modeling in the latent space can be a powerful alternative to existing self-supervised methods in the ECG domain. We introduce ECG-JEPA, a SSL model for 12-lead ECG analysis that learns semantic representations of ECG data by predicting in the hidden latent space, bypassing the need to reconstruct raw signals. This approach offers several advantages in the ECG domain: (1) it avoids producing unnecessary details, such as noise, which is common in ECG; and (2) it addresses the limitations of naïve L2 loss between raw signals. Another key contribution is the introduction of Cross-Pattern Attention (CroPA), a specialized masked attention mechanism tailored for 12-lead ECG data. ECG-JEPA is trained on the union of several open ECG datasets, totaling approximately 180,000 samples, and achieves state-of-the-art performance in various downstream tasks including ECG classification and feature prediction. Our code is openly available at https://github.com/sehunfromdaegu/ECG_JEPA.