Test-Time Adaptation for ECG Classification via SQI-Gated Self-Training and Beat-Rhythm Consistency

arXiv:2608.23347v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep learning models for electrocardiogram (ECG) classification often suffer from significant performance degradation when deployed in unseen domains due to shifts in acquisition devices and patient populations. Test-time adaptation (TTA) offers a practical solution by adapting models using only unlabeled data at inference time. However, existing TTA methods often underperform on ECG tasks, since naive online updates ignore the hierarchical beat-rhythm structure of cardiac cycles and are vulnerable to signal artifacts, which leads to unstable adaptation and model drift. We propose BeatRhythm-TTA, an ECG-tailored TTA framework that explicitly accounts for ECG's noisy observations and structured beat-rhythm semantics under domain shift. First, to handle pervasive ECG artifacts, we introduce a Signal Quality Index (SQI)-gated adaptation scheme that selectively filters out low-quality signals to prevent harmful updates. Second, to leverage ECG's beat-rhythm semantics, we enforce dual-level consistency so the model preserves beat morphology and rhythm dynamics while adapting to shifted acquisition conditions. Extensive experiments on multi-label ECG diagnosis across three adaptation protocols, using PTB-XL as the source domain and CPSC2018/Georgia as two target domains, demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, yielding an average +2.70% relative improvement in Macro-F1 over the best competing method.

Abstract:Deep learning models for electrocardiogram (ECG) classification often suffer from significant performance degradation when deployed in unseen domains due to shifts in acquisition devices and patient populations. Test-time adaptation (TTA) offers a practical solution by adapting models using only unlabeled data at inference time. However, existing TTA methods often underperform on ECG tasks, since naive online updates ignore the hierarchical beat-rhythm structure of cardiac cycles and are vulnerable to signal artifacts, which leads to unstable adaptation and model drift. We propose BeatRhythm-TTA, an ECG-tailored TTA framework that explicitly accounts for ECG's noisy observations and structured beat-rhythm semantics under domain shift. First, to handle pervasive ECG artifacts, we introduce a Signal Quality Index (SQI)-gated adaptation scheme that selectively filters out low-quality signals to prevent harmful updates. Second, to leverage ECG's beat-rhythm semantics, we enforce dual-level consistency so the model preserves beat morphology and rhythm dynamics while adapting to shifted acquisition conditions. Extensive experiments on multi-label ECG diagnosis across three adaptation protocols, using PTB-XL as the source domain and CPSC2018/Georgia as two target domains, demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, yielding an average +2.70% relative improvement in Macro-F1 over the best competing method.

Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2608.23347 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2608.23347v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.23347 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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Test-Time Adaptation for ECG Classification via SQI-Gated Self-Training and Beat-Rhythm Consistency

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