HQ-DCGAN: Hybrid quantum deep convolutional generative adversarial network approach for ECG generation

The class imbalance of electrocardiogram (ECG) data is a serious impediment to the development of diagnostic systems for heart disease. To address this issue, this paper proposes HQ-DCGAN, a hybrid quantum deep convolutional generative adversarial network, specifically designed for the generation of ECGs. The proposed algorithm employs different quantum convolutional layers for the generator and discriminator as feature extractors and utilizes parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) to enhance computational capabilities, along with the model-feature mapping process. Moreover, this algorithm preserves the nonlinearity and scalability inherent to classical convolutional neural networks (CNNs), thereby optimizing the utilization of quantum resources, and ensuring compatibility with contemporary quantum devices. In addition, this paper proposes a novel evaluation metric, 1D Fréchet Inception Distance (1DFID), to assess the quality of the generated ECG signals. Simulation experiments show that HQ-DCGAN exhibits strong performance in ECG signal generation. Furthermore, the generated signals achieve an average classification accuracy of 82.2%, outperforming the baseline algorithms. It has been experimentally proven that HQ-DCGAN is friendly to currently noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers, in terms of both number of qubits and circuit depths, while improving the stability.