  Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have drawn increasing
attention since the learned embeddings pretrained on large-scale datasets have
shown powerful ability in various downstream applications. However, whether the
learned knowledge by LLMs can be transferred to clinical cardiology remains
unknown. In this work, we aim to bridge this gap by transferring the knowledge
of LLMs to clinical Electrocardiography (ECG). We propose an approach for
cardiovascular disease diagnosis and automatic ECG diagnosis report generation.
We also introduce an additional loss function by Optimal Transport (OT) to
align the distribution between ECG and language embedding. The learned
embeddings are evaluated on two downstream tasks: (1) automatic ECG diagnosis
report generation, and (2) zero-shot cardiovascular disease detection. Our
approach is able to generate high-quality cardiac diagnosis reports and also
achieves competitive zero-shot classification performance even compared with
supervised baselines, which proves the feasibility of transferring knowledge
from LLMs to the cardiac domain.
