Human-like visual computing advances explainability and few-shot learning in deep neural networks for complex physiological data

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Main Authors: Alahmadi, Alaa, Hasan, Mohamed
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Alahmadi, Alaa
Hasan, Mohamed
author_facet Alahmadi, Alaa
Hasan, Mohamed
contents Machine vision models, particularly deep neural networks, are increasingly applied to physiological signal interpretation, including electrocardiography (ECG), yet they typically require large training datasets and offer limited insight into the causal features underlying their predictions. This lack of data efficiency and interpretability constrains their clinical reliability and alignment with human reasoning. Here, we show that a perception-informed pseudo-colouring technique, previously demonstrated to enhance human ECG interpretation, can improve both explainability and few-shot learning in deep neural networks analysing complex physiological data. We focus on acquired, drug-induced long QT syndrome (LQTS) as a challenging case study characterised by heterogeneous signal morphology, variable heart rate, and scarce positive cases associated with life-threatening arrhythmias such as torsades de pointes. This setting provides a stringent test of model generalisation under extreme data scarcity. By encoding clinically salient temporal features, such as QT-interval duration, into structured colour representations, models learn discriminative and interpretable features from as few as one or five training examples. Using prototypical networks and a ResNet-18 architecture, we evaluate one-shot and few-shot learning on ECG images derived from single cardiac cycles and full 10-second rhythms. Explainability analyses show that pseudo-colouring guides attention toward clinically meaningful ECG features while suppressing irrelevant signal components. Aggregating multiple cardiac cycles further improves performance, mirroring human perceptual averaging across heartbeats. Together, these findings demonstrate that human-like perceptual encoding can bridge data efficiency, explainability, and causal reasoning in medical machine intelligence.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_22349
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Human-like visual computing advances explainability and few-shot learning in deep neural networks for complex physiological data
Alahmadi, Alaa
Hasan, Mohamed
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Human-Computer Interaction
Machine Learning
Machine vision models, particularly deep neural networks, are increasingly applied to physiological signal interpretation, including electrocardiography (ECG), yet they typically require large training datasets and offer limited insight into the causal features underlying their predictions. This lack of data efficiency and interpretability constrains their clinical reliability and alignment with human reasoning. Here, we show that a perception-informed pseudo-colouring technique, previously demonstrated to enhance human ECG interpretation, can improve both explainability and few-shot learning in deep neural networks analysing complex physiological data. We focus on acquired, drug-induced long QT syndrome (LQTS) as a challenging case study characterised by heterogeneous signal morphology, variable heart rate, and scarce positive cases associated with life-threatening arrhythmias such as torsades de pointes. This setting provides a stringent test of model generalisation under extreme data scarcity. By encoding clinically salient temporal features, such as QT-interval duration, into structured colour representations, models learn discriminative and interpretable features from as few as one or five training examples. Using prototypical networks and a ResNet-18 architecture, we evaluate one-shot and few-shot learning on ECG images derived from single cardiac cycles and full 10-second rhythms. Explainability analyses show that pseudo-colouring guides attention toward clinically meaningful ECG features while suppressing irrelevant signal components. Aggregating multiple cardiac cycles further improves performance, mirroring human perceptual averaging across heartbeats. Together, these findings demonstrate that human-like perceptual encoding can bridge data efficiency, explainability, and causal reasoning in medical machine intelligence.
title Human-like visual computing advances explainability and few-shot learning in deep neural networks for complex physiological data
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Human-Computer Interaction
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22349