English

Q-Heart: ECG Question Answering via Knowledge-Informed Multimodal LLMs

Signal Processing 2025-05-13 v1

Abstract

Electrocardiography (ECG) offers critical cardiovascular insights, such as identifying arrhythmias and myocardial ischemia, but enabling automated systems to answer complex clinical questions directly from ECG signals (ECG-QA) remains a significant challenge. Current approaches often lack robust multimodal reasoning capabilities or rely on generic architectures ill-suited for the nuances of physiological signals. We introduce Q-Heart, a novel multimodal framework designed to bridge this gap. Q-Heart leverages a powerful, adapted ECG encoder and integrates its representations with textual information via a specialized ECG-aware transformer-based mapping layer. Furthermore, Q-Heart leverages dynamic prompting and retrieval of relevant historical clinical reports to guide tuning the language model toward knowledge-aware ECG reasoning. Extensive evaluations on the benchmark ECG-QA dataset show Q-Heart achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing methods by a 4% improvement in exact match accuracy. Our work demonstrates the effectiveness of combining domain-specific architectural adaptations with knowledge-augmented LLM instruction tuning for complex physiological ECG analysis, paving the way for more capable and potentially interpretable clinical patient care systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.06296,
  title  = {Q-Heart: ECG Question Answering via Knowledge-Informed Multimodal LLMs},
  author = {Hung Manh Pham and Jialu Tang and Aaqib Saeed and Dong Ma},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.06296},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T23:27:38.417Z