QG-WRN: A Quantum-Enhanced Graph Convolutional Wide Residual Network for ASD Diagnosis via Neuroimaging Sensing Technology

The pathological mechanism of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exhibits dual heterogeneity: abnormal local energy metabolism and brain-wide high-order topological failure. To synergistically characterize these complex signals captured by advanced neuroimaging sensors, we propose the Quantum-Enhanced Graph Convolutional Wide Residual Network (QG-WRN), a modality-specific, decoupled parallel dual-stream architecture. In the classical branch, to accurately capture the spatial distribution of local metabolic abnormalities, we employ a wide residual network (WRN) to extract amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (ALFF) features, leveraging its expanded feature channels to effectively mine regional neurodynamic properties. Furthermore, to overcome the representational bottlenecks of classical linear operators in parsing hidden, long-range network connections, we introduce quantum computing, exploiting its exponentially expansive state space and intrinsic low-parameter regularization mechanism. Guided by these properties, the quantum branch utilizes a variational quantum graph convolutional (QGCN) module—featuring a trainable circular encoding strategy and a hardware-efficient 4-qubit configuration—with a 2-layer nested message passing structure to process the functional connectivity (FC) matrix, harnessing quantum interference in Hilbert space to parse complex topology while effectively mitigating overfitting on small-sample medical data. A unified training scheme achieves full-dimensional fusion of node activity and topology. Achieving 68.49% accuracy, our method outperforms 10 classic and recent new baselines, providing a powerful computational intelligence tool for sensor-based ASD clinical diagnosis. Furthermore, interpretability analysis successfully maps core disease hubs to standard AAL116 atlas coordinates, providing a powerful tool for computationally aided ASD diagnosis.