AI Research Selected for Oral Presentation at Leading IEEE Biomedical Imaging Conference

The University of Limassol is proud to announce the research to which Dr. Stathis Hadjidemetriou contributed and has been selected for oral presentation at the IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI) 2026, one of the most prestigious international conferences in biomedical imaging and artificial intelligence for medicine.

The symposium, which will take place in London, is jointly organised by the IEEE Signal Processing Society and the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society and brings together leading researchers from around the world working at the intersection of AI, medicine and biomedical imaging.

The paper titled “Beat-SSL: Capturing Local ECG Morphology through Heartbeat-Level Contrastive Learning with Soft Targets” presents a new artificial intelligence framework for analysing electrocardiogram (ECG) signals.

Electrocardiograms are widely used to monitor heart health, yet training AI systems to interpret them traditionally requires large volumes of expert-labelled data. The proposed Beat-SSL framework introduces a self-supervised learning approach that allows AI models to learn directly from ECG signals without relying heavily on labelled datasets.

Unlike existing methods that focus primarily on overall heart rhythm, this approach captures the fine-grained morphology of individual heartbeats, enabling more detailed analysis of cardiac signals.

The research was conducted in collaboration with the University of Glasgow, with contributions from PhD researcher Muhammad Ilham Rizqyawan, supervised by Professor Fani Deligianni and co-supervised by Dr. Stathis Hadjidemetriou.

Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves 93% of the performance of large ECG foundation models trained on more than 30 times the amount of data, while surpassing them in detailed ECG wave segmentation tasks.

This achievement highlights the increasing importance of artificial intelligence in advancing medical diagnostics and reflects the University of Limassol’s growing research activity in the fields of AI, medical imaging technologies and biomedical data science.

The research will be presented at the conference in London.