Versatile Cardiovascular Signal Generation with a Unified Diffusion Transformer

TL;DR

UniCardio is a unified diffusion transformer that enhances cardiovascular signal analysis by reconstructing and synthesizing signals, improving real-time monitoring, and supporting healthcare with interpretable, high-quality data even in noisy or unseen conditions.

Contribution

The paper introduces UniCardio, a novel multi-modal diffusion transformer that manages diverse cardiovascular signals within a unified framework, enabling improved signal reconstruction and synthesis.

Findings

Outperforms recent baselines in denoising, imputation, and translation tasks.

Maintains high diagnostic accuracy even in unseen domains.

Supports real-time, interpretable cardiovascular monitoring.

Abstract

Cardiovascular signals such as photoplethysmography (PPG), electrocardiography (ECG), and blood pressure (BP) are inherently correlated and complementary, together reflecting the health of cardiovascular system. However, their joint utilization in real-time monitoring is severely limited by diverse acquisition challenges from noisy wearable recordings to burdened invasive procedures. Here we propose UniCardio, a multi-modal diffusion transformer that reconstructs low-quality signals and synthesizes unrecorded signals in a unified generative framework. Its key innovations include a specialized model architecture to manage the signal modalities involved in generation tasks and a continual learning paradigm to incorporate varying modality combinations. By exploiting the complementary nature of cardiovascular signals, UniCardio clearly outperforms recent task-specific baselines in signal denoising, imputation, and translation. The generated signals match the performance of ground-truth signals in detecting abnormal health conditions and estimating vital signs, even in unseen domains, while ensuring interpretability for human experts. These advantages position UniCardio as a promising avenue for advancing AI-assisted healthcare.