# Wrong Organ, Right Physics: Transferring Echocardiography Pretraining to Lung Ultrasound for Tuberculosis Screening

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.03290 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.03290/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [Attention-based Deep Multiple Instance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04712/) (2018)
- [Self-Supervised Learning from Images with a Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08243/) (2023)
- [V-JEPA 2: Self-Supervised Video Models Enable Understanding, Prediction and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09985/) (2025)
- [Fine-Tuning can Distort Pretrained Features and Underperform Out-of-Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10054/) (2022)
- [Revisiting Feature Prediction for Learning Visual Representations from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08471/) (2024)
- [Transfusion: Understanding Transfer Learning for Medical Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07208/) (2019)
- [USFM: A Universal Ultrasound Foundation Model Generalized to Tasks and Organs towards Label Efficient Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00153/) (2023)
- [EchoPrime: A Multi-Video View-Informed Vision-Language Model for Comprehensive Echocardiography Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09704/) (2024)
- [EchoJEPA: A Latent Predictive Foundation Model for Echocardiography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02603/) (2026)
- [Self-Supervised Pretraining Improves Performance and Inference Efficiency in Multiple Lung Ultrasound Interpretation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02596/) (2023)
- [CardioBench: Do Echocardiography Foundation Models Generalize Beyond the Lab?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00520/) (2025)
- [Vision Foundation Models in Radiology: A Scoping Review of Data, Methodology, Evaluation and Clinical Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07219/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Lung ultrasound (LUS) is attractive for tuberculosis (TB) screening at primary-care level, but labelled cohorts are small. Echocardiography carries no such constraint, while sharing the same underlying ultrasound imaging physics, signal processing and B-mode appearance as LUS. We ask whether an encoder pretrained on that high-resource ultrasound domain carries representations that remain usable in the low-resource one. Only the encoder varies, across seventeen encoders spanning three architecture families. Among them, a latent-predictive video encoder pretrained on generic video (V-JEPA2-L) and its echocardiography counterpart (EchoJEPA-L) differ in pretraining corpus alone. The choice among these encoders does not resolve the classification, the whole family spanning 2.50 percentage points against a measurement resolution of 2.71. What moves the task instead is feature conditioning. Standardising the features between the encoder and the classifier improves all seventeen encoders by a mean of +1.23 percentage points at p=1.5×10-5. On the held-out test set every encoder selected on the development folds stands above the baseline system by up to +2.57 percentage points of area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC), and specificity at 90% sensitivity reaches 79.3% against 60.3%. The contrast specified in advance, EchoJEPA-L against V-JEPA2-L, measures -0.16 percentage points at p=0.926. We therefore find no evidence that shared ultrasonic physics alone makes echocardiography a more productive pretraining corpus than generic video, and any advantage, if present, is smaller than this cohort can resolve. The video encoders receive replicated still images, however, so whether this absence of an effect reflects the pretraining domain or a video encoder applied to static frames cannot be separated. The limiting factor is the labelled cohort rather than the encoder.