Multi-stage temporal and cross-view contrastive learning for self-supervised multi-lead ECG classification

Automated ECG classification using deep learning often struggles with limited labeled data. Self-supervised contrastive learning methods aim to address this challenge by leveraging unlabeled data, yet existing approaches often rely on simplistic, single-dimensional contrastive paradigms. These strategies may fail to effectively capture the complex temporal structures, multi-level features, and interdependencies inherent in multi-lead ECG signals. To address these limitations, we propose a novel self-supervised framework integrating multi-stage prediction and cross-view contrastive learning. Our approach utilizes diverse data augmentations alongside original signals, processed by a Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) enhanced ResNet18 backbone to extract rich features. Segmented ECG signals are further analyzed through temporal contrastive learning to capture local sequential information. Additionally, a Transformer-based module facilitates cross-view contrastive learning by comparing corresponding segments from differently augmented signals, promoting robust, augmentation-invariant features. Extensive experiments on four public benchmarks (PTB-XL, Chapman, CPSC-2018, and SPH) demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art self-supervised baselines in linear separability. Notably, in cross-dataset transfer tasks, our method achieves superior generalizability, even surpassing fully supervised pre-training benchmarks. These results validate the framework’s ability to learn robust, augmentation-invariant features, offering a viable solution for clinical scenarios with scarce annotations. • Propose a self-supervised framework that combines temporal contrastive learning with cross-view predictive learning for multi-lead ECG. • Introduce segmentation plus an SE-ResNet1D-18 backbone to capture local temporal dynamics and channel-wise importance across leads. • Achieve consistent improvements over strong SSL baselines on PTB-XL, Chapman, CPSC-2018, and SPH under linear evaluation and transfer settings.