ECG Instruction Tuning on Multimodal LLMs for Report Generation: Benchmark and Evaluation

Zhongwei Wan, Che Liu, Xin Wang, Chaofan Tao, Hui Shen, Zhenwu Peng, Jie Fu, Rossella Arcucci, Huaxiu Yao, Mi Zhang

Keywords: ECG, Instruction Tuning, LLMs

TL;DR: We introduce the Multi-Modal ECG Instruction Tuning MEIT framework and benchmark, the first attempt to tackle ECG report generation with LLMs and multimodal instructions.

Abstract: Electrocardiogram (ECG) is the primary non-invasive diagnostic tool for monitoring cardiac conditions and is crucial in assisting clinicians. Recent studies have concentrated on classifying cardiac conditions using ECG data but have overlooked ECG report generation, which is time-consuming and requires clinical expertise. To automate ECG report generation and ensure its versatility, we propose the Multimodal ECG Instruction Tuning (MEIT) framework, the first attempt to tackle ECG report generation with LLMs and multimodal instructions. To facilitate future research, we establish a benchmark to evaluate MEIT with various LLMs backbones across two large-scale ECG datasets. Our approach uniquely aligns the representations of the ECG signal and the report, and we conduct extensive experiments to benchmark MEIT with nine open-source LLMs using more than 800,000 ECG reports. MEIT's results underscore the superior performance of instruction-tuned LLMs, showcasing their proficiency in quality report generation, zero-shot capabilities, resilience to signal perturbation, and alignment with human expert evaluation. These findings emphasize the efficacy of our MEIT framework and its potential for real-world clinical application.

Primary Area: datasets and benchmarks

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Submission Number: 9288