Beat-Synchronous Tokenization for ECG Transformers
Transformer-based electrocardiogram (ECG) models commonly tokenize waveforms into fixed temporal patches. Though convenient, fixed patching can split heartbeat structures across token boundaries. We study beat-synchronous tokenization as a physiologically grounded alternative, comparing fixed patches with three beat-aligned strategies: resampled beats, adaptive pooled beats, and resampled beats augmented with R--R interval information. Experiments span two settings: 10-second 12-lead diagnostic classification on PTB-XL after MIMIC-IV-ECG masked pretraining, and 60-second single-lead rhythm classification on Icentia11k after patient-level contrastive pretraining. On PTB-XL, resampled beat ...
| Authors | Ahmed Sameh, Nolan Wilson, Max Enderlein et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 31 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 31 August 2026 |
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