Enhancing Explainable Cardiac Diagnosis with Guide-Grounded Multimodal LLMs

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.20814v1
• Date: Thu, 23 Jul 2026 01:00:10 GMT
• Title: Enhancing Explainable Cardiac Diagnosis with Guide-Grounded Multimodal LLMs
• Abstract summary: We propose a guide-grounded multimodal framework that anchors report generation in curated clinical knowledge.<n>A convolutional neural network (CNN) and Grad-CAM first produce class probabilities and class-specific heatmaps from 12-lead ECG images.<n>In parallel, authoritative ECG textbooks and guideline materials are distilled offline into a structured ECG Interpretation Guide.
• Score: 4.449622404641125
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: The electrocardiogram (ECG) is a cornerstone of cardiac as- sessment, yet clinical deployment of deep learning models remains con- strained by limited interpretability and the hallucination risk of large language models (LLMs). Existing CNN+Grad-CAM+multimodal LLM frameworks can generate ECG reports, but their explanations are often only weakly grounded in established diagnostic criteria, reducing trust- worthiness and reproducibility. We propose a guide-grounded multimodal framework that explicitly anchors report generation in curated clinical knowledge. A convolutional neural network (CNN) and Grad-CAM first produce class probabilities and class-specific heatmaps from 12-lead ECG images. In parallel, authoritative ECG textbooks and guideline materials are distilled offline into a structured ECG Interpretation Guide, which is injected as a fixed knowledge block for every sample. Conditioned on the ECG image, Grad-CAM overlay, CNN-derived fact pack, and the in- jected guide, a multimodal LLM generates structured diagnostic reports with guideline-consistent terminology and criteria usage. Experiments on the full PTB-XL test set demonstrate that guide grounding improves se- mantic quality and perceived consistency of generated reports while pre- serving competitive classification performance. In particular, our method increases the average BERTScore of generated impressions from 0.818 to 0.953 relative to a strong CNN+Grad-CAM+MLLM baseline, indicat- ing closer alignment with reference reports. These findings suggest that injecting a distilled interpretation guide into the multimodal prompting pipeline offers a practical pathway to reduce hallucinations and enhance the clinical plausibility of LLM-based ECG explanations, bringing ex- plainable cardiac diagnosis closer to real-world deployment.

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