Reconstructing 12-Lead ECG from 3-Lead ECG using Variational Autoencoder to Improve Cardiac Disease Detection of Wearable ECG Devices
Portable 3-lead wearable electrocardiograms (ECGs) lack the diagnostic fidelity of clinical 12-lead ECGs, limiting their utility in cardiac screening. Method: We propose WearECG—a novel variational autoencoder (VAE) explicitly modeling spatiotemporal dependencies in ECG signals—to synthesize high-fidelity 12-lead ECGs from 3-lead inputs. The model employs a multi-objective loss combining mean squared error (MSE), mean absolute error (MAE), and Fréchet Inception Distance (FID), and is fine-tuned on ECGFounder for multi-label disease classification. Results: Evaluated on MIMIC-IV, reconstructed ECGs demonstrate physiological plausibility and clinical diagnostic validity, as confirmed by expert blind assessment. Downstream detection of myocardial infarction and other conditions achieves performance comparable to ground-truth 12-lead ECGs. This work pioneers the tight integration of generative modeling with rigorous clinical validation, establishing a scalable, low-cost paradigm for population-level cardiac screening.