A Hybrid Quantum-Classical Multiscale LSTM Framework for Subject-Level EEG-Based Depression Detection

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a common psychiatric disorder that requires reliable and objective assessment for early clinical intervention. Electroencephalography (EEG) is widely used for this purpose because it provides a non-invasive and low-cost measure of brain activity with high temporal resolution. However, EEG-based depression detection remains challenging due to the nonlinear nature of EEG signals, inter-subject variability, and the limited availability of subject-independent evaluation. To address these issues, this paper proposes a hybrid quantum–classical multiscale long short-term memory with parameterized quantum circuit branches (MS-LSTM-PQC) framework for subject-level EEG-based depression detection. The proposed model extracts temporal representations at multiple scales using parallel LSTM branches and incorporates eyes-closed (EC) and eyes-open (EO) condition information through condition-aware feature fusion. To further enhance the learned representations, scale-specific LSTM features are processed using PQC-based quantum branches implemented with TensorFlow Quantum (TFQ), providing an additional nonlinear feature transformation before classification. Experiments were conducted on the Mumtaz EEG depression dataset using EC-only, EO-only, and merged EC+EO conditions with 1-s, 2-s, and 3-s EEG windows. To reduce subject-level data leakage, all experiments were evaluated using 5-fold and 10-fold GroupKFold validation. The best overall accuracies across the evaluated settings were 92.05% and 95.08% under 5-fold and 10-fold GroupKFold validation, respectively. The 2-s merged EC+EO setting provided the most stable performance across validation protocols. In addition, Integrated Gradients (IG)-based explainability analysis showed that frontal and fronto-central channels, especially Fz, showed higher contributions to the model decision. These results suggest that multiscale temporal learning with quantum-enhanced feature transformation can support subject-level EEG-based depression detection under leakage-controlled evaluation.