Cardiac Stability Theory: An Axiomatically Grounded Framework for Continuous Cardiac Health Monitoring via Smartphone Photoplethysmography

arXiv cs.LG / 4/28/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper introduces Cardiac Stability Theory (CST), which defines cardiovascular health as a stability margin around a cardiac dynamical attractor, grounded in four axioms.
  • It derives the Cardiac Stability Index (CSI), combining the largest Lyapunov exponent, recurrence determinism, and signal entropy through time-delay embedding to produce a score in [0,1].
  • An ECG-based model (CSISurrogateV2, CNN-Transformer) reportedly achieves strong predictive performance on PTB-XL, and the authors extend CSI to smartphone PPG using Complementary Domain Transfer (CDT) with fast mobile latency.
  • The smartphone-based approach (TinyCSINet) is validated on multiple datasets and shows correlated cardiac stability across ECG and PPG modalities, including discrimination of atrial fibrillation from normal sinus rhythm (AUROC 0.89).
  • The framework also proposes HeartSpan, a longitudinal stability metric benchmarked to population age norms, aiming to enable continuous, non-invasive monitoring for longevity and cardiac risk stratification.

Abstract

We present Cardiac Stability Theory (CST), an axiomatically grounded framework formally defining cardiovascular health as a stability margin around a cardiac dynamical attractor. From four axioms we derive the Cardiac Stability Index (CSI), a composite scalar in [0,1] integrating the largest Lyapunov exponent, recurrence determinism, and signal entropy via time-delay embedding. The ECG-based model (CSISurrogateV2, CNN-Transformer) achieves R^2=0.8788, MAE=0.0234 on PTB-XL (21,799 recordings). We extend CSI to smartphone PPG via Complementary Domain Transfer (CDT): CSISurrogateV2 generates pseudo-labels for the BUT PPG dataset (48 recordings, 12 subjects), training TinyCSINet (122,849 parameters), achieving MAE=0.0557, \rho=0.660 on the held-out test set (n=1065 windows) at {<}30 ms mobile latency. CDT is validated on BIDMC, Welltory, and RWS-PPG. Paired validation on 5,035 BIDMC windows yields r=0.454 (\rho=0.485, p<10^{-295}), confirming correlated cardiac stability across modalities. CSI is negatively correlated with age (slope = -0.000225 CSI/year, PTB-XL), discriminates atrial fibrillation from normal sinus rhythm (AUROC=0.89), and is robust under Perturbation Invariance Training (max AUC drop 1.65\%). We derive HeartSpan, a longitudinal stability metric relative to population age norms, enabling continuous non-invasive cardiac monitoring from commodity smartphones for longevity tracking and cardiac risk stratification.