ECG Synthesis via Diffusion-Based State Space Augmented Transformer

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are a major global health concern, causing significant morbidity and mortality. AI's integration with healthcare offers promising solutions, with data-driven techniques, including ECG analysis, emerging as powerful tools. However, privacy concerns pose a major barrier to distributing healthcare data for addressing data-driven CVD classification. To address confidentiality issues related to sensitive health data distribution, we propose leveraging artificially synthesized data generation. Our contribution introduces a novel diffusion-based model coupled with a State Space Augmented Transformer. This synthesizes conditional 12-lead electrocardiograms based on the 12 multilabeled heart rhythm classes of the PTB-XL dataset, with each lead depicting the heart's electrical activity from different viewpoints. Recent advances establish diffusion models as groundbreaking generative tools, while the State Space Augmented Transformer captures long-term dependencies in time series data. The quality of generated samples was assessed using metrics like Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD). To evaluate authenticity, we assessed the similarity of performance of a pre-trained classifier on both generated and real ECG samples.