Hybrid Quantum-Classical Neural Network for Automated Pneumonia Detection from Chest X-Rays: A Comparative Study
K. Senthilkumar, 2. Dr. Sankar S
Abstract Pneumonia remains a leading cause of mortality globally, necessitating rapid and accurate diagnostic tools to assist radiologists. While classical Deep Learning (DL) models, particularly Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), have demonstrated high efficacy in medical image analysis, they are often characterized by high computational complexity and massive parameter requirements. This research proposes a novel Hybrid Quantum-Classical Neural Network (HQCNN) to detect Pneumonia from chest X-ray images with enhanced computational efficiency. By integrating a classical ResNet-18 architecture for feature extraction with a Variational Quantum Circuit (VQC) based on PennyLane, we leverage the quantum mechanical principles of superposition and entanglement for pattern recognition. The proposed model was trained and validated on a standard chest X-ray dataset and benchmarked against a classical transfer learning equivalent. Experimental results indicate that the hybrid quantum model achieved a validation accuracy of 78% with significantly fewer trainable parameters (~ 24) compared to the classical baseline (62% accuracy, ~ 1026 parameters). Furthermore, the quantum model demonstrated superior sensitivity (100% Recall), successfully identifying all positive pneumonia cases in the validation batch. This study highlights the potential of Quantum Machine Learning (QML) as a resource-efficient, high-sensitivity alternative for future medical diagnostic systems.
•Apr 24, 2026•0 citations