QAMT: An LLM-Based Framework for Quality-Assured Medical Time-Series Data Generation

The extensive deployment of diverse sensors in hospitals has resulted in the collection of various medical time-series data. However, these real-world medical time-series data suffer from limited volume, poor data quality, and privacy concerns, resulting in performance degradation in downstream tasks, such as medical research and clinical decision-making. Existing studies provide generated medical data as a supplement or alternative to real-world data. However, medical time-series data are inherently complex, including temporal data such as laboratory measurements and static event data such as demographics and clinical outcomes, with each patient's temporal data being influenced by their static event data. This intrinsic complexity makes the generation of high-quality medical time-series data particularly challenging. Traditional methods typically employ Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) or Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), but these methods struggle to generate high-quality static event data of medical time-series data and often lack interpretability. Currently, large language models (LLMs) introduce new opportunities for medical data generation, but they face difficulties in generating temporal data and have challenges in specific domain generation tasks. In this study, we are the first to propose an LLM-based framework for modularly generating medical time-series data, QAMT, which generates quality-assured data and ensures the interpretability of the generation process. QAMT constructs a reliable health knowledge graph to provide medical expertise to the LLMs and designs dual modules to simultaneously generate static event data and temporal data, constituting high-quality medical time-series data. Moreover, QAMT introduces a quality assurance module to evaluate the generated data. Unlike existing methods, QAMT preserves the interpretability of the data generation process. Experimental results show that QAMT can generate higher-quality time-series medical data compared with existing methods.