Leveraging Cardiac Imaging to Improve ECG-Based Detection of Chagas Disease in Resource-Constrained Settings
Chagas disease is a major cause of cardiomyopathy in Latin America. Cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging can characterize its structural abnormalities, but scanners and expert readers remain scarce in endemic regions. Electrocardiography (ECG) is inexpensive and widely available, yet structural disease must be inferred indirectly from electrical signals. We propose to transfer CMR-derived structural knowledge to ECG through contrastive pre-training. Using 63,193 paired ECG-CMR examinations from the UK Biobank, we align an ECG encoder with a clinically grounded CMR embedding space using an asymmetric InfoNCE objective. Despite seeing no Chagas cases during pre-training, the resulting r...
| Authors | Laura Alvarez-Florez, Daniel Uyterlinde, Samuel Ruipérez-Campillo et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 8 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 September 2026 |
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