# ECGFlowCMR: Pretraining with ECG-Generated Cine CMR Helps Cardiac Disease Classification and Phenotype Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20904 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20904/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14792/) (2022)
- [VideoGPT: Video Generation using VQ-VAE and Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10157/) (2021)
- [ModelScope Text-to-Video Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06571/) (2023)
- [MoCoGAN: Decomposing Motion and Content for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.04993/) (2017)
- [Phenaki: Variable Length Video Generation From Open Domain Textual Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02399/) (2022)
- [Latent Video Diffusion Models for High-Fidelity Long Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13221/) (2022)
- [Stochastic Video Generation with a Learned Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07687/) (2018)
- [Stochastic Variational Video Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.11252/) (2017)
- [AnyPPG: An ECG-Guided PPG Foundation Model Trained on Over 100,000 Hours of Recordings for Holistic Health Profiling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01747/) (2025)
- [Ultrasound Image-to-Video Synthesis via Latent Dynamic Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14966/) (2025)
- [Simulator and Experience Enhanced Diffusion Model for Comprehensive ECG Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.09895/) (2025)
- [Self-Alignment Learning to Improve Myocardial Infarction Detection from Single-Lead ECG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19397/) (2025)
- [Translating Electrocardiograms to Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging Useful for Cardiac Assessment and Disease Screening: A Multi-Center Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13602/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Cardiac Video Translation Via Motion Feature Guided Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02003/) (2025)
- [Phenotype-Guided Generative Model for High-Fidelity Cardiac MRI Synthesis: Advancing Pretraining and Clinical Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03426/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [One Frame, Full Heartbeat: ECG-Free 4D Cardiac Cine MRI Synthesis via Radial-Decomposed Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.09185/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cardiac Magnetic Resonance (CMR) imaging provides a comprehensive assessment of cardiac structure and function but remains constrained by high acquisition costs and reliance on expert annotations, limiting the availability of large-scale labeled datasets. In contrast, electrocardiograms (ECGs) are inexpensive, widely accessible, and offer a promising modality for conditioning the generative synthesis of cine CMR. To this end, we propose ECGFlowCMR, a novel ECG-to-CMR generative framework that integrates a Phase-Aware Masked Autoencoder (PA-MAE) and an Anatomy-Motion Disentangled Flow (AMDF) to address two fundamental challenges: (1) the cross-modal temporal mismatch between multi-beat ECG recordings and single-cycle CMR sequences, and (2) the anatomical observability gap due to the limited structural information inherent in ECGs. Extensive experiments on the UK Biobank and a proprietary clinical dataset demonstrate that ECGFlowCMR can generate realistic cine CMR sequences from ECG inputs, enabling scalable pretraining and improving performance on downstream cardiac disease classification and phenotype prediction tasks.