The human heart\'s limited regenerative capacity poses significant challenges in treating myocardial infarctions and other cardiac diseases. Traditional therapeutic approaches, such as medications, stents, and transplants, primarily focus on symptom management rather than reversing underlying myocardial damage. Recent breakthroughs in regenerative artificial intelligence, particularly through the use of generative adversarial networks, offer promising avenues for cardiac repair. GANs have been successfully applied in cardiovascular research to enhance imaging analysis and simulate realistic data, improving diagnostic accuracy and treatment outcomes. Building on this foundation, we propose a novel approach to cardiac signal regeneration using GAN-based AI. This methodology enables the reconstruction and enhancement of degraded or missing electrocardiogram signals, significantly improving diagnostic accuracy. Moreover, it opens new possibilities for AI-assisted myocardial tissue regeneration by predicting and simulating healthy cardiac patterns. These regenerated signals can be integrated into pacemakers and other cardiac devices to optimize pacing and improve heart function. By leveraging AI-driven insights, this approach not only enhances diagnostic capabilities but also paves the way for personalized, data-driven interventions that transcend traditional symptomatic management, potentially revolutionizing cardiac care and offering new hope for patients with cardiac diseases.
Introduction
1. Introduction
Cardiac diseases are a leading cause of death globally.
Current treatments (medications, stents, transplants) manage symptoms but do not regenerate heart tissue.
The heart’s limited ability to self-repair drives the need for regenerative strategies.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) offer potential in biomedical applications such as:
ECG signal enhancement
Simulation of healthy cardiac patterns
Tissue regeneration modeling
2. Research Objectives
Develop a custom GAN architecture to:
Reconstruct degraded ECG signals
Simulate healthy cardiac electrical activity
Improve diagnostic accuracy and enable AI-assisted myocardial tissue regeneration
Explore using regenerated ECG signals to optimize pacemaker function.
3. Research Contributions
Proposes GAN-enhanced ECG signal regeneration for cardiac diagnostics.
Introduces AI-driven pacing strategies using simulated healthy ECG signals.
Shows improved diagnostic precision over traditional signal classification methods.
Aims to shift from symptomatic to regenerative, personalized cardiac care.
4. Literature Review Highlights
Traditional ECG analysis via CNNs and RNNs is limited to classification and denoising.
Advanced techniques (e.g., wavelet transforms, hybrid RNNs) have explored signal feature extraction.
GANs have recently been used to:
Generate realistic synthetic ECGs
Support data augmentation
Enhance diagnostic model training
Few studies focus on regeneration and real-time applications of ECGs.
5. Methodology
Dataset
MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Dataset used for training and testing.
Data underwent:
Noise reduction
Normalization
Segmentation
Outlier removal and interpolation
GAN Architecture (ReGen-ECGNet)
1D GAN with:
Generator: Reconstructs high-fidelity ECG signals
Discriminator: Differentiates real from generated ECGs
Uses adversarial and reconstruction losses for training
Can be integrated into AI-assisted pacemaker algorithms
Aims to improve pacing by aligning with natural heart rhythms
Ethical Considerations
Privacy, data anonymization, and regulatory compliance are emphasized
Follows ethical AI standards for transparency, reproducibility, and patient safety
6. Results & Evaluation
GAN model outperforms CNN, RNN, and LSTM in reconstructing and classifying ECGs.
Best performance in accuracy and fidelity of ECG regeneration.
Demonstrates GAN’s potential for:
Enhancing ECG signal quality
Supporting regenerative cardiac therapy
7. Dataset & Class Distribution
Heartbeats categorized per AAMI standards into:
NB (Normal): 90,589
SB (Supraventricular): 8,039
VB (Ventricular): 7,236
FB (Fusion): 2,776
QB (Unknown/Noise): 803
Training/Test Split: 70% training / 30% testing for each class
Conclusion
The capabilities of Generative Adversarial Networks for ECG signal regression and classification in the area of cardiac care are shown in this study. In comparison to traditional model such as CNN, RNN and LSTM GAN based approach demonstrated significance in metrics which validates that GAN have potential enhancement to the diagnostic capability by reconstructing degraded ECG signals. An attempt at advancing real time cardiac monitoring and personalized treatment can be made by combining the AI driven insights.
The future research will further improve the GAN architecture for even better signal regeneration by experimenting with such advanced variations of the GANs as WGANs and cGANs to be more stable and efficient. Moreover, the application of this approach to wearable devices and integration of such in AI-based cardiac devices could enhance the heart function. Another direction of future work is to further validate the large-scale clinical applicability using real world healthcare settings for ensuring the practical applicability and safety of AI assisted cardiac care.
References
[1] “The Lancet Commission to reduce the global burden of sudden cardiac death: a call for multidisciplinary action - The Lancet.” Accessed: Apr. 28, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(23)00875-9/abstract
[2] “The Real Need for Regenerative Medicine in the Future of Congenital Heart Disease Treatment.” Accessed: Apr. 28, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9059/9/5/478
[3] G. A. Fishbein, M. C. Fishbein, J. Wang, and L. M. Buja, “Chapter 10 - Myocardial ischemia and its complications,” in Cardiovascular Pathology (Fifth Edition), L. M. Buja and J. Butany, Eds., Academic Press, 2022, pp. 407–445. doi: 10.1016/B978-0-12-822224-9.00022-0.
[4] H. Peng, K. Shindo, R. R. Donahue, and A. Abdel-Latif, “Cardiac Cell Therapy: Insights into the Mechanisms of Tissue Repair,” Int. J. Mol. Sci., vol. 22, no. 3, Art. no. 3, Jan. 2021, doi: 10.3390/ijms22031201.
[5] R. K. Pandey and Y. K. Rathore, “Deep learning in 3D cardiac reconstruction: a systematic review of methodologies and dataset,” Med. Biol. Eng. Comput., Jan. 2025, doi: 10.1007/s11517-024-03273-y.
[6] V. M. Saceleanu et al., “Integrative Approaches in Acute Ischemic Stroke: From Symptom Recognition to Future Innovations,” Biomedicines, vol. 11, no. 10, Art. no. 10, Oct. 2023, doi: 10.3390/biomedicines11102617.
[7] “Deep Learning Methods for Heart Sounds Classification: A Systematic Review.” Accessed: Apr. 28, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/23/6/667
[8] “Cardiac regeneration – Past advancements, current challenges, and future directions - ScienceDirect.” Accessed: Apr. 28, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022282823001153
[9] M. A. Serhani, H. T. El Kassabi, H. Ismail, and A. Nujum Navaz, “ECG Monitoring Systems: Review, Architecture, Processes, and Key Challenges,” Sensors, vol. 20, no. 6, p. 1796, Mar. 2020, doi: 10.3390/s20061796.
[10] L. Wei et al., “Advancements and challenges in stem cell transplantation for regenerative medicine,” Heliyon, vol. 10, no. 16, p. e35836, Aug. 2024, doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e35836.
[11] V. T. N. Linh, S. Han, E. Koh, S. Kim, H. S. Jung, and J. Koo, “Advances in wearable electronics for monitoring human organs: Bridging external and internal health assessments,” Biomaterials, vol. 314, p. 122865, Mar. 2025, doi: 10.1016/j.biomaterials.2024.122865.
[12] S. Matin Malakouti, “Heart disease classification based on ECG using machine learning models,” Biomed. Signal Process. Control, vol. 84, p. 104796, Jul. 2023, doi: 10.1016/j.bspc.2023.104796.
[13] M. F. Safdar, R. M. Nowak, and P. Pa?ka, “Pre-Processing techniques and artificial intelligence algorithms for electrocardiogram (ECG) signals analysis: A comprehensive review,” Comput. Biol. Med., vol. 170, p. 107908, Mar. 2024, doi: 10.1016/j.compbiomed.2023.107908.
[14] E. Brophy, M. De Vos, G. Boylan, and T. Ward, “Multivariate Generative Adversarial Networks and Their Loss Functions for Synthesis of Multichannel ECGs,” IEEE Access, vol. 9, pp. 158936–158945, 2021, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3130421.
[15] M. D. Walker, A. J. Morgan, K. M. Bradley, and D. R. McGowan, “Data-Driven Respiratory Gating Outperforms Device-Based Gating for Clinical18 F-FDG PET/CT,” J. Nucl. Med., vol. 61, no. 11, pp. 1678–1683, Nov. 2020, doi: 10.2967/jnumed.120.242248.
[16] “(PDF) Cardiac Disease Classification Using Denoising and Wavelet Transformation of ECG Signals,” ResearchGate, Apr. 2025, Accessed: Apr. 28, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/362544772_Cardiac_Disease_Classification_Using_Denoising_and_Wavelet_Transformation_of_ECG_Signals
[17] S. Bhattacharyya, S. Majumder, P. Debnath, and M. Chanda, “Arrhythmic Heartbeat Classification Using Ensemble of Random Forest and Support Vector Machine Algorithm,” IEEE Trans. Artif. Intell., vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 260–268, Jun. 2021, doi: 10.1109/TAI.2021.3083689.