PACE-ECG: Patient-Aware Contrastive ECG Pretraining for Transferable Representations

Foundation models for physiological signals are commonly evaluated on in-domain interpretation tasks, but their ability to transfer to longitudinal clinical prognosis across healthcare systems remains uncertain. We developed PACE-ECG, an ECG pretraining framework that combines contrastive learning across temporally neighbouring recordings from the same patient with clinically guided multitask supervision. We evaluated frozen ECG representations for post-myocardial-infarction all-cause mortality and incident heart failure prediction across MIMIC-IV and two external HEEDB cohorts, comparing the proposed representation with DeepECG-SSL, a state-of-the-art model, and two control baselines. Across both downstream tasks, the proposed model outperformed DeepECG-SSL in-domain (AUROC +1.9\% for mortality and +4.0\% for heart failure) and on external populations in HEEDB-Boston (+5.6\% for mortality and +10.3\% for heart failure) and HEEDB-Atlanta (+6.9\% for mortality +11.0\% for heart failure) while using an encoder 41 times smaller and a fraction of the pretraining data. A matched ablation showed that patient-temporal pairing improved external mortality and heart failure AUROC over generic self-supervision by 7.0\% and 9.4\% on HEEDB-Boston and 8.9\% and 9.3\% on HEEDB-Atlanta. These findings indicate that pretraining-objective design greatly influences downstream transfer alongside model and data scale, and that in-domain performance alone is insufficient to establish the clinical generalisability of ECG foundation representations.