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This paper presents ECGXtract, a deep learning-based approach for interpretable ECG feature extraction, addressing the limitations of traditional signal processing and black-box machine learning methods. In particular, we develop convolutional neural network models capable of extracting both temporal and morphological features with strong correlations to a clinically validated ground truth. Initially, each model is trained to extract a single feature, ensuring precise and interpretable outputs. A series of experiments is then carried out to evaluate the proposed method across multiple setups, including global versus lead-specific features, different sampling frequencies, and comparisons with other approaches such as ECGdeli. Our findings show that ECGXtract achieves robust performance across most features with a mean correlation score of 0.80 with the ground truth for global features, with lead II consistently providing the best results. For lead-specific features, ECGXtract achieves a mean correlation score of 0.822. Moreover, ECGXtract achieves superior results to the state-of-the-art open source ECGdeli as it got a higher correlation score with the ground truth in 90% of the features. Furthermore, we explore the feasibility of extracting multiple features simultaneously utilizing a single model. Semantic grouping is proved to be effective for global features, while large-scale grouping and lead-specific multi-output models show notable performance drops. These results highlight the potential of structured grouping strategies to balance the computational efficiency vs. model accuracy, paving the way for more scalable and clinically interpretable ECG feature extraction systems in limited resource settings.

Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training without sharing raw data, making it attractive for privacy-sensitive domains, e.g., healthcare, finance, and IoT. A major obstacle, however, is the potential heterogeneity of tabular data across clients, in practical settings, where schema mismatches and incompatible feature spaces prevent straightforward aggregation. To address this challenge, this paper proposes FedLLM-Align, a federated learning framework that leverages pretrained transformer based language models for feature extraction. Towards this objective, FedLLM-Align serializes tabular records into text and derives semantically aligned embeddings from a pretrained LLM encoder, e.g, DistilBERT, facilitating lightweight local classifier heads that can be trained in a federated manner using standard aggregation schemes, e.g., FedAvg, while keeping all raw data records local. To quantify the merits and trade-offs of FedLLM-Align, we evaluate the proposed framework on binary classification tasks from two different domains: i) Coronary heart disease prediction on partitioned Framingham Heart Study data, and ii) Customer churn prediction on a financial dataset. FedLLM-Align outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by up to 25% in terms of the F1 score, under simulated schema heterogeneity, and achieves a 65% reduction in the communication overhead. These results establish FedLLM-Align as a privacy-preserving and communication-efficient approach for federated training based on clients with heterogeneous tabular datasets, commonly encountered in practice.

Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) cause over 17 million deaths annually worldwide, highlighting the urgent need for privacy-preserving predictive systems. We introduce FedCVD++, an enhanced federated learning (FL) framework that integrates both parametric models (logistic regression, SVM, neural networks) and non-parametric models (Random Forest, XGBoost) for coronary heart disease risk prediction. To address key FL challenges, we propose: (1) tree-subset sampling that reduces Random Forest communication overhead by 70%, (2) XGBoost-based feature extraction enabling lightweight federated ensembles, and (3) federated SMOTE synchronization for resolving cross-institutional class imbalance. Evaluated on the Framingham dataset (4,238 records), FedCVD++ achieves state-of-the-art results: federated XGBoost (F1 = 0.80) surpasses its centralized counterpart (F1 = 0.78), and federated Random Forest (F1 = 0.81) matches non-federated performance. Additionally, our communication-efficient strategies reduce bandwidth consumption by 3.2X while preserving 95% accuracy. Compared to existing FL frameworks, FedCVD++ delivers up to 15% higher F1-scores and superior scalability for multi-institutional deployment. This work represents the first practical integration of non-parametric models into federated healthcare systems, providing a privacy-preserving solution validated under real-world clinical constraints.