Computer Science > Machine Learning
arXiv:2603.09940 (cs)
[Submitted on 10 Mar 2026]
Title:SignalMC-MED: A Multimodal Benchmark for Evaluating Biosignal Foundation Models on Single-Lead ECG and PPG
Authors:Fredrik K. Gustafsson, Xiao Gu, Mattia Carletti, Patitapaban Palo, David W. Eyre, David A. Clifton
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Abstract:Recent biosignal foundation models (FMs) have demonstrated promising performance across diverse clinical prediction tasks, yet systematic evaluation on long-duration multimodal data remains limited. We introduce SignalMC-MED, a benchmark for evaluating biosignal FMs on synchronized single-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) and photoplethysmogram (PPG) data. Derived from the MC-MED dataset, SignalMC-MED comprises 22,256 visits with 10-minute overlapping ECG and PPG signals, and includes 20 clinically relevant tasks spanning prediction of demographics, emergency department disposition, laboratory value regression, and detection of prior ICD-10 diagnoses. Using this benchmark, we perform a systematic evaluation of representative time-series and biosignal FMs across ECG-only, PPG-only, and ECG + PPG settings. We find that domain-specific biosignal FMs consistently outperform general time-series models, and that multimodal ECG + PPG fusion yields robust improvements over unimodal inputs. Moreover, using the full 10-minute signal consistently outperforms shorter segments, and larger model variants do not reliably outperform smaller ones. Hand-crafted ECG domain features provide a strong baseline and offer complementary value when combined with learned FM representations. Together, these results establish SignalMC-MED as a standardized benchmark and provide practical guidance for evaluating and deploying biosignal FMs.
| Comments: | |
| Subjects: | Machine Learning (cs.LG) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2603.09940 [cs.LG] |
| (or arXiv:2603.09940v1 [cs.LG] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.09940
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Submission history
From: Fredrik K. Gustafsson [view email][v1] Tue, 10 Mar 2026 17:32:28 UTC (23,120 KB)
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View a PDF of the paper titled SignalMC-MED: A Multimodal Benchmark for Evaluating Biosignal Foundation Models on Single-Lead ECG and PPG, by Fredrik K. Gustafsson and 5 other authors
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