Cyclostationary Phase Conditioning for Medical Time Series Diffusion
Organizations: Dept. of Computer Science ETH Zurich
Abstract
Many physiological time series, such as cardiac and brain recordings, exhibit cyclostationarity: their statistics vary periodically with an underlying cycle phase. Corruption from motion, poor contact, and physiological interference obscures morphology needed for diagnosis, making signal restoration essential. Existing diffusion approaches condition on corrupted observations alone and must learn cyclic structure implicitly. We instead propose two inductive biases which encode cyclostationarity: a shift-covariant wavelet representation and dense per-sample phase conditioning inferred from the corrupted input. We further introduce a training-free cyclostationarity index that quantifies phase structure and predicts when phase conditioning will help. Finally, we propose antithetic coupling of reverse trajectories to reduce sampling variance while achieving comparable performance with fivefold fewer network evaluations. Across modalities, our results show that explicitly encoding measurable cyclic structure improves physiological time-series restoration.
Figures & tables
| Task | Baseline | PTSDiff | |
|---|---|---|---|
| PPG | HR MAE | 5.947 | 5.155 |
| ECG | PTB-XL AUROC | 0.840 | 0.848 |
| ECG | MIT-BIH F1 | 0.543 | 0.630 |
| EMG | Activation bal. acc. | 0.749 | 0.750 |
| EEG | Band-power error | 4.56 | 3.31 |
| Frame | Analytical | Auxiliary | |||||
| (SWT) | Phase | Context | phase | loss | SNR | PRD [%] | CC |
| – | – | – | |||||
| – | – | ||||||
| – | – | ||||||
| – | – |
Appendix figures & tables30 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Modality | Detector mode | Refractory [ms] | Smoothing [ms] | Event width [ms] | Threshold scale | [Hz] | [Hz] |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ECG | QRS peaks |
| Hyperparameter | ECG | PPG | EEG | EMG |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Learning rate | ||||
| Scheduler | MultiStepLR | ReduceLROnPlateau | MultiStepLR | ReduceLROnPlateau |
| Scheduler settings | milestones , | factor , patience | milestones , | factor , patience |
| Phase warm-start | Yes | No | No | No |
| Wavelet | Sym4 | Sym4 | Db4 | Sym4 |
| Decomposition levels | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| Setting | Metric | Direction | Definition |
| All modalities | SNR | ||
| All modalities | PRD | ||
| All modalities | CC | ||
| ECG | SSD | ||
| ECG | MAD | ||
| ECG | CosSim |
| Dataset | Model | SNR | PRD [%] | CC | SSD | MAD | CosSim |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PTB-XL | Noisy ( dB) | ||||||
| FIR filter | |||||||
| SWT denoising | |||||||
| TCDAE | |||||||
| DeScoD-1 | |||||||
| DeScoD-3 |
| Noise level | Model | SNR | PRD [%] | CC | SSD | MAD | CosSim |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0.2-0.6 | Noisy | ||||||
| FIR filter | |||||||
| SWT denoising | |||||||
| TCDAE | |||||||
| DeScoD-1 | |||||||
| DeScoD-3 |
| Noise level | Model | SNR | PRD [%] | CC | SSD | MAD | CosSim |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0.2-0.6 | Noisy | ||||||
| FIR filter | |||||||
| SWT denoising | |||||||
| TCDAE | |||||||
| DeScoD-10 | |||||||
| TFCDiff-10 |
| Noise level | Model | SNR | PRD [%] | CC | SSD | MAD | CosSim |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0.2-0.6 | Noisy | ||||||
| FIR filter | |||||||
| SWT denoising | |||||||
| TCDAE | |||||||
| DeScoD-10 | |||||||
| TFCDiff-10 |
| Modality | Train | Held-out | Best baseline | SNR | PRD [%] | CC | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PPG | PPG-DaLiA | BIDMC | DDAE | ||||||
| ECG | PTB-XL | MIT-BIH | DeScoD-10 | ||||||
| ECG | PTB-XL | QTDB | TFCDiff-10 | ||||||
| EMG | NinaPro DB2 | NinaPro DB3 | SDEMG | ||||||
| EEG | EEGdenoiseNet | EEGMMIDB | EEGIFNet |
| Baseline | Metric | MIT-BIH | PTB-XL | QTDB |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| TFCDiff-10 | SNR | |||
| PRD [%] | ||||
| CC | ||||
| TCDAE | SNR | |||
| PRD [%] | ||||
| CC |
| Per-class AUROC | Macro | |||||
| Model | CD | HYP | MI | NORM | STTC | AUROC |
| clean | .871 .019 | .782 .031 | .845 .020 | .916 .012 | .878 .017 | .859 .011 |
| noisy | .830 .022 | .722 .034 | .753 .024 | .866 .015 | .822 .020 | .799 .012 |
| FIR Filter | .828 .023 | .729 .034 | .758 .025 | .855 .015 | .818 .020 | .798 .012 |
| SWT Denoising | .788 .024 | .716 .032 | .658 .028 | .798 .019 | .772 .024 | .746 .013 |
| TCDAE | .855 .020 | .760 .033 | .829 .022 | .902 .013 | .853 .018 | .840 .012 |
| Model | AUROC | Specificity | Sensitivity | F1 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| clean | .926 .004 | .991 .001 | .580 .014 | .703 .012 |
| noisy | .718 .008 | .989 .001 | .151 .010 | .243 .014 |
| FIR Filter | .734 .008 | .990 .001 | .157 .010 | .254 .014 |
| SWT Denoising | .722 .008 | .971 .002 | .206 .011 | .286 .014 |
| TCDAE | .839 .007 | .979 .001 | .436 .013 | .543 .013 |
| DeScoD | .822 .007 | .919 .003 | .541 .014 | .490 .011 |
| Class | clean | noisy | FIR Filter | SWT Denoising | TCDAE | DeScoD | TFCDiff | PTSDiff -MC-10 | PTSDiff -AV-10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sensitivity | |||||||||
| CD | .695 .041 | .592 .043 | .727 .040 | .775 .035 | .641 .043 | .647 .041 | .683 .041 | .691 .039 | .679 .041 |
| HYP | .520 .066 | .143 .046 | .161 .050 | .184 .053 | .534 .066 | .592 .067 | .583 .064 | .538 .065 | .543 .065 |
| MI | .662 .044 | .827 .036 | .880 .031 | .954 .021 | .600 .048 | .585 .045 | .624 .042 | .621 .045 | .624 .045 |
| NORM | .892 .019 | .446 .033 | .425 .031 | .166 .024 | .893 .019 | .880 .020 | .860 .022 | .905 .019 | .905 .018 |
| STTC | .669 .044 | .862 .031 | .675 .043 | .669 .041 | .614 .047 | .650 .045 | .638 .044 | .610 .046 | .606 .045 |
| Modality | Task (metric) | Clean | Corrupted | Best baseline | PTSDiff -AV-10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PPG | HR estimation (MAE, bpm) | ||||
| ECG | PTB-XL superdiagnostic (macro AUROC) | ||||
| ECG | MIT-BIH beat classification (F1) | ||||
| EMG | NinaPro DB2 muscle activation (balanced acc.) | ||||
| EEG | Band-power preservation ( rel. error, %) |
| Ablation ( from full model, dB) | PPG | ECG | EMG | EEG |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Phase conditioning | ||||
| Temporal context | ||||
| Shift-covariant frame | ||||
| Auxiliary losses | ||||
| Analytical phase (vs. learned) | – | – | – |
| Modality | Dataset | AC window [Hz] | [95% CI] | [95% CI] |
| PPG | PPG-DaLiA | 0.5–3 | [ , ] | – |
| BIDMC † | 0.5–3 | [ , ] | – | |
| Mean | – | |||
| ECG | PTB-XL | 0.5–3 | [ , ] | [ , ] |
| QTDB † | 0.5–3 | [ , ] | [ , ] | |
| MIT-BIH † | 0.5–3 | [ , ] | [ , ] |
| Metric | Daubechies | Symlets | Coiflets | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| db 4 | db 6 | db 8 | sym 4 | sym 6 | sym 8 | coif 3 | coif 4 | coif 5 | |||
| 2 | SNR | ||||||||||
| PRD | |||||||||||
| 4 | SNR | ||||||||||
| PRD | |||||||||||
| 6 | SNR | ||||||||||
| Metric | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0.05 | 0.1 | 0.2 | 0.3 | 0.5 | 1 | |||
| 0.05 | SNR | |||||||
| PRD | ||||||||
| 0.1 | SNR | |||||||
| PRD | ||||||||
| 0.2 | SNR | |||||||
| Model / sampler | NFE | Params [M] | Wall-clock [ms] | SNR | vs. MC |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DeScoD-ECG, MC-10 | — | ||||
| DeScoD-ECG, AV-2 | |||||
| TFCDiff, MC-10 | — | ||||
| TFCDiff, AV-2 | |||||
| PTSDiff , MC-10 | — | ||||
| PTSDiff , AV-2 |