Vision-language classification of Torsades de Pointes risk from pseudo-coloured ECG images: do T-wave morphology and colour context help or hinder?
Dario Labrador Alonso, Alaa Alahmadi
Abstract
Contextual prompting is widely presented as a cheap route to better performance from vision models, but the evidence comes largely from benchmarks in which an attribute named in a prompt is also present in the image, confounding the two channels. We investigate the significance of context for a semantically complex biomedical signal classification task using a domain-adapted vision-language model, BiomedCLIP. Building on our previous work that renders electrocardiogram (ECG) signals as colour-enhanced images to flag Torsades de Pointes risk using the QT-nomogram and pseudo-colouring technique, we cross four context strategies with four T-wave morphology label sets, evaluated zero-shot and with a class-balanced linear probe, under five-fold stratified cross-validation on 9,789 images. Zero-shot inference is unusable. Once trained, the colour-enhanced images outperform the colourless ones on every metric: balanced accuracy 0.903 versus 0.825, sensitivity 0.914 versus 0.827, specificity 0.892 versus 0.823, ROC-AUC 0.955 versus 0.888 and Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) 0.437 versus 0.311. Crossing colour-in-image with colour-in-prompt separates the confounded channels: the image contributes +0.126 MCC (+0.078 balanced accuracy, +0.067 ROC-AUC) whether or not the prompt names colour, whereas naming it changes nothing under any metric. Context is two-sided: the best prompt set gains 0.008 MCC where colour is present and 0.016 where it is not, while the worst loses 0.017 and 0.013. For a signal rendered as an image, the leverage lies in how the signal is drawn rather than in how it is described - and where the endpoint is an interval measurement, prompts naming T-wave morphology describe the wrong quantity.