From Pretraining to SLDR : A New Milestone for Team BeatNet

This week, We made significant progress by moving from model development to system-level validation in preparation for our upcoming System-Level Design Review (SLDR). After weeks of developing and fine-tuning the key elements of our ECG analysis pipeline, the team achieved important technical and documentation milestones that advance us toward a deployable and clinically valuable system.

Key Accomplishments This Week

SLDR Preparation and Architecture Finalization

A significant portion of our efforts went toward preparing the SLDR report and presentation, which required consolidating architecture decisions, documenting interfaces, validating functional requirements, and aligning our work with Aventusoft’s deployment expectations. This process allowed us to refine our system blueprint and ensure each subsystem—preprocessing, fiducial detection, classification, and deployment—fits into a cohesive and verifiable design.

Progress on the Foundation Model Pipeline

We continued advancing the foundation model workflow by evaluating lightweight architectures and early-stage distillation strategies to support mobile inference. This included comparing smaller CNNs and Transformer variants, analyzing their compute profiles, and assessing whether they meet BeatNet’s <30-second runtime requirement for mobile deployment.

Fiducial Detection & Classification Integration

Work also progressed on the integration between the fiducial regression module and the arrhythmia classifier. We refined the windowing logic, updated segmentation strategies based on coach feedback, and prepared the models for the upcoming validation phase, which will begin after SLDR.

Explainability as a New Priority

Following sponsor discussions, explainability has become a major focus for the next sprint. Physicians must understand why the model makes its decisions. In line with that requirement, the team has begun planning explainability modules such as:

• Attention heatmaps for rhythm classification
• P/Q/R/S/T waveform overlays for delineation transparency
• Interpretability dashboards for both cloud and mobile inference

These additions will support clinical trust and align the system with regulatory expectations for traceability and interpretability.

Documentation & Technical Review

We completed substantial sections of the SLDR document—including system architecture, requirements traceability, software interfaces, and deployment considerations. This helped us validate the technical cohesion of the project and prepare for sponsor review.

Next Steps: Validation, Explainability, and Deployment Readiness

With SLDR approaching, our focus for next week will shift toward running validation experiments for both the segmentation and classification modules, implementing the first generation of explainability tools, and continuing our research on model compression, quantization, and distillation to support mobile deployment. At the same time, we will be finalizing the SLDR presentation materials to clearly communicate our path toward cloud and mobile integration. As we enter a phase where accuracy, interpretability, and efficiency converge, the SLDR checkpoint will serve as an important opportunity to demonstrate our progress and gather targeted feedback from our sponsors, guiding us into the next stage of system development.

See you next week!