EchoBridge: Long-Tail-Aware ECG-Echocardiography Text Alignment for Echocardiography-Derived Cardiac Findings

Abstract

Standardized echocardiography conclusions provide meaningful supervision for learning ECG representations of echocardiography-derived cardiac findings. Global ECG--text alignment may entangle modality-specific factors, while long-tailed finding distributions provide sparse positive supervision for low-prevalence conditions. We propose EchoBridge with Complementary Shared--Private Projection (CSPP) and Adaptive Prototype Boundary Calibration (APBC). CSPP maps each modality into shared and auxiliary private projections, reduces directional redundancy via within-modality orthogonality, and bidirectionally aligns normalized shared projections. APBC organizes the shared hypersphere with class-specific prototypes, training-frequency-adaptive angular margins, and spherical Riesz repulsion. We evaluate EchoBridge on EchoNext-Mini and independent PKUPH and SHTMU cohorts under four protocols: prompt-based inference without downstream classifier training, in-domain frozen linear probing, target-domain cross-center frozen linear probing, and source-only cross-center transfer, supplemented by finding-specific analyses. EchoBridge improves classifier-free AUROC, AUPRC, and F1 over the strongest baselines by 7.88, 5.61, and 4.54 points, respectively, and achieves the highest point estimates across all in-domain and target-domain probing budgets and both source-only transfer cohorts. Finding-specific analyses show gains for most conditions, including several low-prevalence valvular findings.