Abstract
TRACE (Text-Reinforced Analysis of Cardio ECGs) is a multimodal electrocardiogram (ECG) representation model that learns clinically grounded signal embeddings for downstream cardiac classification. It is designed to address the limitations of existing CLIP-style training, which often struggles with noisy clinical text and fails to leverage the complementary strengths of unimodal (from ECG) and cross-modal (between ECG and matched cardiologist reports) learning. To bridge this gap, we propose a hybrid architecture that jointly learns unimodal and cross-modal representations via uncertainty-weighted multi-task learning while utilizing an LLM-based pipeline to extract high-fidelity findings from cardiologist reports. We evaluate TRACE across a spectrum of clinical urgency, establishing robust performance on public benchmarks for arrhythmia classification and structural abnormalities relative to existing unimodal and multimodal ECG models. To demonstrate real-world utility, we further validate the model on acute coronary occlusion (ACO), where the prevailing ST-elevation criteria miss 25-34% of true occlusions. Utilizing a large private ACO dataset with expert-annotated ground truth, TRACE significantly outperforms real-world clinical practice, yielding a 19.0% increase in sensitivity or a 62.6% reduction in false positive rates at the clinical baseline. This extensive evaluation confirms that TRACE delivers both strong performance on benchmark tasks and tangible clinical impact in the most acute, high-risk cardiac scenarios.
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Cite this article
APA 7
Panchumarthi, L. Y., Lu, A., Kataria, S., Bold, D., Wang, M., Yan, R., Dykes, P., Gow, B. J., Pollard, T. J., Zègre-Hemsey, J. K., Dzikowicz, D. J., Kumar, L., Hu, X., & Xiao, R. (2026). TRACE: Expert-Aligned ECG Representation Learning with Rigorous Benchmarking and Real-World Validation in Acute Cardiac Care. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/trace-expert-aligned-ecg-representation-learning-with-rigorous-benchmarking-and-real-world-validation-in-acute-cardiac-care
MLA 9
Panchumarthi, Lovely Yeswanth, et al. "TRACE: Expert-Aligned ECG Representation Learning with Rigorous Benchmarking and Real-World Validation in Acute Cardiac Care." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/trace-expert-aligned-ecg-representation-learning-with-rigorous-benchmarking-and-real-world-validation-in-acute-cardiac-care.
Chicago (author–date)
Panchumarthi, Lovely Yeswanth, Andrew Lu, Saurabh Kataria, Delgersuren Bold, Minxiao Wang, Runze Yan, Patricia Dykes, Brian J. Gow, Tom J. Pollard, Jessica K. Zègre-Hemsey, Dillon J. Dzikowicz, Lekshmi Kumar, Xiao Hu, and Ran Xiao. 2026. "TRACE: Expert-Aligned ECG Representation Learning with Rigorous Benchmarking and Real-World Validation in Acute Cardiac Care." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/trace-expert-aligned-ecg-representation-learning-with-rigorous-benchmarking-and-real-world-validation-in-acute-cardiac-care.
Harvard
Panchumarthi, L. Y., Lu, A., Kataria, S., Bold, D., Wang, M., Yan, R., Dykes, P., Gow, B. J., Pollard, T. J., Zègre-Hemsey, J. K., Dzikowicz, D. J., Kumar, L., Hu, X. and Xiao, R. (2026) 'TRACE: Expert-Aligned ECG Representation Learning with Rigorous Benchmarking and Real-World Validation in Acute Cardiac Care', Available at: https://omanscience.com/en/articles/trace-expert-aligned-ecg-representation-learning-with-rigorous-benchmarking-and-real-world-validation-in-acute-cardiac-care.
Vancouver
Panchumarthi LY, Lu A, Kataria S, Bold D, Wang M, Yan R, et al. TRACE: Expert-Aligned ECG Representation Learning with Rigorous Benchmarking and Real-World Validation in Acute Cardiac Care. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/trace-expert-aligned-ecg-representation-learning-with-rigorous-benchmarking-and-real-world-validation-in-acute-cardiac-care
IEEE
L. Y. Panchumarthi, A. Lu, S. Kataria, D. Bold, M. Wang, R. Yan, P. Dykes, B. J. Gow, T. J. Pollard, J. K. Zègre-Hemsey, D. J. Dzikowicz, L. Kumar, X. Hu, and R. Xiao, "TRACE: Expert-Aligned ECG Representation Learning with Rigorous Benchmarking and Real-World Validation in Acute Cardiac Care," https://omanscience.com/en/articles/trace-expert-aligned-ecg-representation-learning-with-rigorous-benchmarking-and-real-world-validation-in-acute-cardiac-care.