C-MELT: Contrastive Enhanced Masked Auto-Encoders for ECG-Language Pre-Training

26 Sept 2024 (modified: 05 Feb 2025)Submitted to ICLR 2025EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Keywords: Multi-modal Representation Learning, Contrastive Masked Auto-Encoders, ECG-Text Pre-Training
Abstract: Accurate interpretation of Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals is pivotal for diagnosing cardiovascular diseases. Integrating ECG signals with their accompanying textual reports holds immense potential to enhance clinical diagnostics through the combination of physiological data and qualitative insights. However, this integration faces significant challenges due to inherent modality disparities and the scarcity of labeled data for robust cross-modal learning. To address these obstacles, we propose C-MELT, a novel framework that pre-trains ECG and text data using a contrastive masked auto-encoder architecture. C-MELT uniquely combines the strengths of generative with enhanced discriminative capabilities to achieve robust cross-modal representations. This is accomplished through masked modality modeling, specialized loss functions, and an improved negative sampling strategy tailored for cross-modal alignment. Extensive experiments on five public datasets across diverse downstream tasks demonstrate that C-MELT significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving an average AUC improvement of 15% in linear probing with only one percent of training data and 2% in zero-shot performance without requiring training data over state-of-the-art models. These results highlight the effectiveness of C-MELT, underscoring its potential to advance automated clinical diagnostics through multi-modal representations.
Primary Area: unsupervised, self-supervised, semi-supervised, and supervised representation learning
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Submission Number: 7622
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