QuantEIT: Ultra-Lightweight Quantum-Assisted Inference for Chest Electrical Impedance Tomography

Abstract: Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) is a non-invasive, low-cost bedside imaging modality with high temporal resolution, making it suitable for bedside monitoring. However, its inherently ill-posed inverse problem poses significant challenges for accurate image reconstruction. Deep learning (DL)-based approaches have shown promise but often rely on complex network architectures with a large number of parameters, limiting efficiency and scalability. Here, we propose an Ultra-Lightweight Quantum-Assisted Inference (QuantEIT) framework for EIT image reconstruction. QuantEIT leverages a Quantum-Assisted Network (QA-Net), combining parallel 2-qubit quantum circuits to generate expressive latent representations that serve as implicit nonlinear priors, followed by a single linear layer for conductivity reconstruction. This design drastically reduces model complexity and parameter number. Uniquely, QuantEIT operates in an unsupervised, training-data-free manner and represents the first integration of quantum circuits into EIT image reconstruction. Extensive experiments on simulated and real-world 2D and 3D EIT lung imaging data demonstrate that QuantEIT outperforms conventional methods, achieving comparable or superior reconstruction accuracy using only 0.2% of the parameters, with enhanced robustness to noise.