arXiv subjects

Francesca Dalia Faraci

Publications and source records attributed to Francesca Dalia Faraci.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Do ECG Foundation Models Transfer to Rare Cardiac Diseases? Evidence from Brugada Syndrome Detection

Background: Foundation models (FMs) trained on large-scale unlabeled physiological data have emerged as a promising paradigm for medical artificial intelligence. Their ability to capture clinically meaningful, transferable representations for rare diseases remains largely unproven. This study investigates whether FM pre-training provides genuine clinical generalization benefits beyond improved optimization for rare electrocardiographic (ECG) phenotypes. Methods: We systematically evaluated nine publicly available ECG FMs for Brugada syndrome detection on the BrSwiss cohort (294 patients, 87 cases) and the independent external HUCA cohort (363 patients, 76 cases), under three strategies (from-scratch training, linear probing, full fine-tuning) across several configurations, including a 3% data ablation and zero-shot cross-site transfers. Results: Pre-training was necessary for high-capacity architectures unable to converge from scratch (AUC gain up to 0.411, p < 0.05), but gave no significant gain for compact architectures already converged on labeled data alone. On full BrSwiss, the best fine-tuned FM (ECG-CPC, AUC = 0.962) only marginally exceeded the strongest supervised baseline (ECG-CPC from scratch, AUC = 0.932; p = 0.091). At matched training-set size, the data-efficiency advantage on BrSwiss-3% (AUC gain = 0.055, p < 0.01) did not replicate on HUCA. Under zero-shot cross-site transfer, FM-based pipelines did not generalize better than supervised baselines, all approaching chance-level performance. Conclusion: For Brugada syndrome detection, FM pre-training is mechanical rather than semantic, providing optimization stability rather than transferable clinical knowledge. These findings challenge the assumption that large-scale pre-training inherently encodes clinically meaningful representations, highlighting the central role of model architecture and data-domain alignment.

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arXiv2025

Self-DANA: A Resource-Efficient Channel-Adaptive Self-Supervised Approach for ECG Foundation Models

Foundation Models (FMs) are large-scale machine learning models trained on extensive, diverse datasets that can be adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks with minimal fine-tuning. In the last two years, interest in FMs has also grown for applications in the cardiological field to analyze the electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. One of the key properties of FMs is their transferability to a wide range of downstream scenarios. With the spread of wearable and portable devices, keen interest in learning from reduced-channel configurations has arisen. However, the adaptation of ECG FMs to downstream scenarios with fewer available channels still has to be properly investigated. In this work, we propose Self-DANA, a novel, easy-to-integrate solution that makes self-supervised architectures adaptable to a reduced number of input channels, ensuring resource efficiency and high performance. We also introduce Random Lead Selection, a novel augmentation technique to pre-train models in a more robust and channel-agnostic way. Our experimental results on five reduced-channel configurations demonstrate that Self-DANA significantly enhances resource efficiency while reaching state-of-the-art performance. It requires up to 69.3% less peak CPU memory, 34.4% less peak GPU memory, about 17% less average epoch CPU time, and about 24% less average epoch GPU time.

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arXiv2024

Comparison analysis between standard polysomnographic data and in-ear-EEG signals: A preliminary study

Study Objectives: Polysomnography (PSG) currently serves as the benchmark for evaluating sleep disorders. Its discomfort makes long-term monitoring unfeasible, leading to bias in sleep quality assessment. Hence, less invasive, cost-effective, and portable alternatives need to be explored. One promising contender is the in-ear-EEG sensor. This study aims to establish a methodology to assess the similarity between the single-channel in-ear-EEG and standard PSG derivations. Methods: The study involves four-hour signals recorded from ten healthy subjects aged 18 to 60 years. Recordings are analyzed following two complementary approaches: (i) a hypnogram-based analysis aimed at assessing the agreement between PSG and in-ear-EEG-derived hypnograms; and (ii) a feature-based analysis based on time- and frequency- domain feature extraction, unsupervised feature selection, and definition of Feature-based Similarity Index via Jensen-Shannon Divergence (JSD-FSI). Results: We find large variability between PSG and in-ear-EEG hypnograms scored by the same sleep expert according to Cohen's kappa metric, with significantly greater agreements for PSG scorers than for in-ear-EEG scorers (p < 0.001) based on Fleiss' kappa metric. On average, we demonstrate a high similarity between PSG and in-ear-EEG signals in terms of JSD-FSI (0.79 +/- 0.06 -awake, 0.77 +/- 0.07 -NREM, and 0.67 +/- 0.10 -REM) and in line with the similarity values computed independently on standard PSG-channel-combinations. Conclusions: In-ear-EEG is a valuable solution for home-based sleep monitoring, however further studies with a larger and more heterogeneous dataset are needed.

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arXiv2023

Multi-Scored Sleep Databases: How to Exploit the Multiple-Labels in Automated Sleep Scoring

Study Objectives: Inter-scorer variability in scoring polysomnograms is a well-known problem. Most of the existing automated sleep scoring systems are trained using labels annotated by a single scorer, whose subjective evaluation is transferred to the model. When annotations from two or more scorers are available, the scoring models are usually trained on the scorer consensus. The averaged scorer's subjectivity is transferred into the model, losing information about the internal variability among different scorers. In this study, we aim to insert the multiple-knowledge of the different physicians into the training procedure. The goal is to optimize a model training, exploiting the full information that can be extracted from the consensus of a group of scorers. Methods: We train two lightweight deep learning based models on three different multi-scored databases. We exploit the label smoothing technique together with a soft-consensus (LSSC) distribution to insert the multiple-knowledge in the training procedure of the model. We introduce the averaged cosine similarity metric (ACS) to quantify the similarity between the hypnodensity-graph generated by the models with-LSSC and the hypnodensity-graph generated by the scorer consensus. Results: The performance of the models improves on all the databases when we train the models with our LSSC. We found an increase in ACS (up to 6.4%) between the hypnodensity-graph generated by the models trained with-LSSC and the hypnodensity-graph generated by the consensus. Conclusion: Our approach definitely enables a model to better adapt to the consensus of the group of scorers. Future work will focus on further investigations on different scoring architectures and hopefully large-scale-heterogeneous multi-scored datasets.

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arXiv2021

DeepSleepNet-Lite: A Simplified Automatic Sleep Stage Scoring Model with Uncertainty Estimates

Deep learning is widely used in the most recent automatic sleep scoring algorithms. Its popularity stems from its excellent performance and from its ability to directly process raw signals and to learn feature from the data. Most of the existing scoring algorithms exploit very computationally demanding architectures, due to their high number of training parameters, and process lengthy time sequences in input (up to 12 minutes). Only few of these architectures provide an estimate of the model uncertainty. In this study we propose DeepSleepNet-Lite, a simplified and lightweight scoring architecture, processing only 90-seconds EEG input sequences. We exploit, for the first time in sleep scoring, the Monte Carlo dropout technique to enhance the performance of the architecture and to also detect the uncertain instances. The evaluation is performed on a single-channel EEG Fpz-Cz from the open source Sleep-EDF expanded database. DeepSleepNet-Lite achieves slightly lower performance, if not on par, compared to the existing state-of-the-art architectures, in overall accuracy, macro F1-score and Cohen's kappa (on Sleep-EDF v1-2013 +/-30mins: 84.0%, 78.0%, 0.78; on Sleep-EDF v2-2018 +/-30mins: 80.3%, 75.2%, 0.73). Monte Carlo dropout enables the estimate of the uncertain predictions. By rejecting the uncertain instances, the model achieves higher performance on both versions of the database (on Sleep-EDF v1-2013 +/-30mins: 86.1.0%, 79.6%, 0.81; on Sleep-EDF v2-2018 +/-30mins: 82.3%, 76.7%, 0.76). Our lighter sleep scoring approach paves the way to the application of scoring algorithms for sleep analysis in real-time.

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