Akanta Das, Tasinul Islam Ahon, Ahmed Mahir Sultan Rumi +3cs.AI
Electrocardiography (ECG) is one of the most widely used non-invasive tools for diagnosing cardiovascular disease, but transforming multi-lead ECG recordings into reliable clinical reports remains challenging. Automating ECG report generation could reduce clinicians' interpretive workload, improve diagnostic efficiency, and expand access to cardiac assessment in underserved communities. Unlike image-based report-generation tasks, ECG interpretation requires the analysis of subtle temporal morphologies, followed by coherent diagnostic reasoning expressed in dense clinical terminology. Existing systems predominantly focus on classification, while current report-generation methods often produce outputs that remain inadequate for practical clinical use. To address these challenges, we propose ECG-LENS, an end-to-end ECG report-generation framework that jointly integrates multi-lead signal modeling, diagnosis-aware representations, and clinically grounded text generation. ECG-LENS combines lead-wise encoders that preserve localized waveform morphology with a global encoder that captures inter-lead dependencies. To guide report generation, we fuse signal representations with clinically enriched textual prompts that condition a GPT-2 decoder. We further introduce an ECG-specific report-preprocessing strategy that helps the model focus on clinically meaningful findings. Finally, because lexical metrics may under- or overestimate report quality, we propose F1-ECGBERT, a BERT-based, ECG-specific metric that measures agreement between diagnostic labels extracted from generated and reference reports. In-domain experiments on PTB-XL and cross-domain evaluation on MIMIC-IV-ECG show that ECG-LENS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, with absolute gains of 4.0%, 6.3%, and 11.5% in METEOR, ROUGE-L, and F1-ECGBERT, respectively, over the strongest baselines.
Automatic evaluation is critical for high-stakes text generation, where errors often involve omitted findings, hallucinated content, polarity reversals, location changes, uncertainty mismatches, and temporal-comparison errors rather than low surface similarity alone. Radiology report generation provides a challenging test case because generated reports must preserve structured clinical evidence across sources. We present RadOT-Eval, an interpretable structured-evidence optimal transport framework for offline auditing of radiology report generation. RadOT-Eval decomposes reference and candidate reports into attribute-structured clinical evidence units, aligns corresponding evidence using entropy-regularized optimal transport, and uses clinically meaningful side-channel discrepancies in a monotone risk model to predict error burden. All transport, feature, and readout choices are selected using the ReXVal dataset, and the frozen system is evaluated on the independent RadEvalX dataset. RadOT-Eval achieves Spearman correlations of 0.715, 0.548, and 0.399 with total, clinically significant, and clinically insignificant annotated error burden, respectively, yielding higher point estimates than standard evaluation metrics and the open-source large language model (LLM)-based evaluator GREEN-radllama2-7B. In a frozen auxiliary corruption-sensitivity stress test on ReXErr-v1, RadOT-Eval achieves 0.768 AUROC and a 0.990 corrupted-greater-than-clean paired win rate. These results show that structured evidence transport provides an auditable, rank-oriented evaluation tool for high-stakes generated clinical text under ReXVal-only model selection and frozen RadEvalX testing.