Methods and systems are provided for cardiac triggering of an imaging system. a method for an imaging system comprises acquiring, during a scan of a subject, an electrical signal indicating a periodic physiological motion of an organ of the subject, inputting a sample of the electrical signal into a trained neural network to detect whether a peak is present in the sample, triggering acquisition of image data responsive to detecting the peak in the sample, and not triggering the acquisition of image data responsive to not detecting the peak in the sample. In this way, the timing of data acquisition may be optimally and robustly synchronized with a cardiac cycle.