Foundation Models in Electrocardiogram: A Review (2410.19877v2)

Abstract: The electrocardiogram (ECG) is ubiquitous across various healthcare domains, such as cardiac arrhythmia detection and sleep monitoring, making ECG analysis critically essential. Traditional deep learning models for ECG are task-specific, with a narrow scope of functionality and limited generalization capabilities. Recently, foundation models (FMs), also known as large pre-training models, have fundamentally reshaped the scheme of model design and representation learning, enhancing the performance across a variety of downstream tasks. This success has drawn interest in the exploration of FMs to address ECG-based medical challenges concurrently. This survey provides a timely, comprehensive and up-to-date overview of FMs for large-scale ECG-FMs. First, we offer a brief background introduction to FMs. Then, we discuss the model architectures, pre-training methods, and adaptation approaches of ECG-FMs from a methodology perspective. Despite the promising opportunities of ECG-FMs, we also outline the challenges and potential future directions. Overall, this survey aims to provide researchers and practitioners with insights into the research of ECG-FMs on theoretical underpinnings, domain-specific applications, and avenues for future exploration.