This paper introduces CompressedMediQ, a novel hybrid quantum-classical machine learning pipeline specifically developed to address the computational challenges associated with high-dimensional multi-class neuroimaging data analysis. Standard neuroimaging datasets, such as large-scale MRI data from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative and Neuroimaging in Frontotemporal Dementia, present significant hurdles due to their vast size and complexity. CompressedMediQ integrates classical HPC nodes for advanced MRI pre-processing and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-PCA-based feature extraction and reduction, addressing the limited-qubit availability for quantum data encoding in the NISQ era. This is followed by Quantum Support Vector Machine (QSVM) classification. By utilizing quantum kernel methods, the pipeline optimizes feature mapping and classification, enhancing data separability and outperforming traditional neuroimaging analysis techniques. Experimental results highlight the pipeline’s superior accuracy in dementia staging, validating the practical use of quantum machine learning in clinical diagnostics. Despite the limitations of NISQ devices, this proof-of-concept demonstrates the transformative potential of quantum-enhanced learning, paving the way for scalable and precise diagnostic tools in healthcare and signal processing.
This paper introduces CompressedMediQ, a novel hybrid quantum-classical machine learning pipeline specifically developed to address the computational challenges associated with high-dimensional multi-class neuroimaging data analysis. Standard neuroimaging datasets, such as large-scale MRI data from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative and Neuroimaging in Frontotemporal Dementia, present significant hurdles due to their vast size and complexity. CompressedMediQ integrates classical HPC nodes for advanced MRI pre-processing and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-PCA-based feature extraction and reduction, addressing the limited-qubit availability for quantum data encoding in the NISQ era. This is followed by Quantum Support Vector Machine (QSVM) classification. By utilizing quantum kernel methods, the pipeline optimizes feature mapping and classification, enhancing data separability and outperforming traditional neuroimaging analysis techniques. Experimental results highlight the pipeline’s superior accuracy in dementia staging, validating the practical use of quantum machine learning in clinical diagnostics. Despite the limitations of NISQ devices, this proof-of-concept demonstrates the transformative potential of quantum-enhanced learning, paving the way for scalable and precise diagnostic tools in healthcare and signal processing.
Alzheimer's disease (AD) presents significant diagnostic challenges owing to the subtle morphological similarities observed in the early stages, with traditional deep learning approaches often struggling to distinguish between the various stages of disease progression via structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) data. Quantum computing offers unique advantages for medical image analysis, leveraging superposition and entanglement capabilities to process high-dimensional feature spaces beyond the limits of classical computation. This study introduces a hybrid quantum-classical neural network architecture (HQC-Net) for accurate four-class Alzheimer's disease classification, which uses quantum processing to detect patterns that are often invisible to classical spatial analysis methods. The proposed framework integrates classical feature extractors, including a custom CNN and modified ResNet18, with six-qubit variational quantum circuits that employ multiaxis rotation encoding (RY→RZ→RX), a quantum Fourier transform for spectral decomposition, and multihead attention for effective quantum-classical feature fusion. Comprehensive evaluations were conducted on the Kaggle dataset (5,121 samples) and the OASIS dataset (20,000 samples), incorporating realistic quantum noise modelling, including depolarising, amplitude damping, and phase damping channels. The modified QResNet18 configuration achieved a test accuracy of 99.67%, with perfect discriminative capability (AUC = 1.0000) on the OASIS dataset. Quantum processing demonstrated superior detection of very mild dementia (99.86% accuracy), which is crucial for early intervention. The proposed approach outperformed existing quantum-enhanced methods by 3.57 percentage points while effectively handling the increased diagnostic complexity associated with four-class classification. This study demonstrates a practical quantum advantage for multiclass neuroimaging classification, achieving superior diagnostic accuracy while maintaining computational efficiency and clinical deployment feasibility under current Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) hardware constraints.
Abstract Neuro-imaging data is necessary for timely and correct diagnosis of the disease Alzheimer’s (AD). Early clinical intervention is challenging due to the high-dimensional nature of the images, making it computationally difficult to work on representations, sparse annotated datasets and inter-subject variance. Deep convolutional VGG, ResNet, DenseNet, MobileNet and other neural networks (CNNs) have shown good performance. Diagnostic performance, but they are based on a high number of parameters and require highly trained personnel. Data can often times restrict resilience to data-skimy clinical settings. To address these challenges, the current paper presents a hybrid Quantum Machine Learning (QML) architecture for Alzheimer’s disease Detection and classification based on a combination of classical CNN-based feature extraction and Variational quantum classifier. In the suggested method, diseased, relevant, and compact features are extracted using pre-trained CNN backbones. Data from structural MRI scans is later translated into quantum states and computed. With parameterised variational quantum circuits optimised with a hybrid quantum-classical learning loop. The proposed method has been experimentally evaluated on benchmark datasets of MRI scans of Alzheimer’s patients. The hybrid CNNQML model has a mean classification accuracy of about 93% which is similar to deep CNN models, including ResNet and DenseNet (94%), and much more. Beating lightweight models like MobileNet and shallow CNNs by six percentage points. It is worth noting that the hybrid QML model performs better in conditions with limited training data. Performance degradation is observed in accuracy and AUC for all CNN variants, with up to 5% lower performance to deep CNNs. Cross-validation, confidence interval, paired significance test, and statistical validation. Effect size analysis proves the fact that the hybrid model produces statistically significant performance, as well as cases of clinically meaningful improvements over lightweight CNN baselines. Similar to the state-of-the-art deep networks with significantly reduced trainable parameters in the classification stage. These findings show that hybrid QML is a data-efficient and powerful substitute in the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. On the whole, this is a work that sets a practical way to integrate quantum machine learning into clinical neuro-imaging pipelines and hybrid settings. QML has supplementary deep-learning enhancement to classics in next-generation Alzheimer’s Decision-support systems.
Over the past decade, exceptional progress has been made in deep learning and its applications to medical imaging including image analysis, disease classification, medical image segmentation, and a variety of other tasks. Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive cognitive disorder and the most common cause of dementia in the world. In this research, we present a lightweight hybrid classical-quantum framework leveraging quantum machine learning (QML) using the pennylane library. Consisting of classical convolutional neural network (CNN) and quantum circuits as quantum nodes wrapped in a torch layer of pytorch, the framework has a total of eight layers including the quantum layer, for the classification of Alzheimer’s disease stages from brain MRI images. Using this framework, the 4 -class Alzheimer’s MRI dataset is assessed. This dataset contains 6400 MRI images across four classes of disease stages, available in the Kaggle. The dataset has gone through the Pre-processing stage of augmentation to scale and balance the classes. The proposed hybrid framework achieves an accuracy of 96.26 % in classifying 4 stages of Alzheimer’s Disease, outperforming the classical deep learning models while utilizing substantially fewer parameters. The superior performance of the hybrid framework is compared with the performance of four other classical models: 1. VGG 2. Densenet 3. Enet and 4. Resnet. Grad-CAM (Explainable AI) is employed to assess the proposed framework’s focus on relevant brain regions and to validate its accuracy through consultation with a medical professional. By ensuring alignment between the framework’s attention and clinical expertise, this research enhances the potential for assisting medical professionals in accurately interpreting neurodegenerative disease states and thereby advancing the development of clinically applicable diagnostic tools. It also demonstrates the feasibility of adopting quantum machine learning in medical image analysis and medical AI.
Purpose This study investigates the integration of quantum-enhanced machine learning (QML) into medical image analysis, focusing on classification and feature extraction tasks. It aims to evaluate whether hybrid quantum-classical models can overcome the limitations of traditional machine learning in handling high-dimensional, clinically relevant imaging data. Design/methodology/approach Hybrid architectures combining classical preprocessing with quantum components, specifically variational quantum circuits (VQCs) and quantum kernel methods, were developed and implemented in simulated quantum environments using Qiskit and PennyLane on Google Colab. Publicly available datasets (ChestX-ray14, Brain Tumor MRI and CT Hemorrhage) were preprocessed and encoded into quantum states. Model performance was evaluated against classical baselines (MLP and CNN) using accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, convergence speed and trainable parameters. Findings Quantum-enhanced models achieved competitive or superior performance compared to classical models with significantly fewer trainable parameters and faster convergence. The Quantum Kernel SVM demonstrated the highest precision (89.1%) and F1-score (88.5%) using only 8 parameters, while VQC models converged up to 2× faster than classical baselines. These results highlight the potential of QML to improve efficiency, robustness and scalability in diagnostic imaging workflows, particularly in resource-constrained or data-limited settings. Research limitations/implications The study relies on simulated quantum environments, which do not capture hardware noise or qubit limitations. Future work will extend to real quantum devices, multimodal data integration and interpretability strategies. Practical implications Quantum kernel methods and lightweight VQC architectures enable faster, resource-efficient diagnostic modeling, making them suitable for clinical environments with limited computational capacity or time-sensitive decision-making needs. Social implications Improving the efficiency and accessibility of medical image analysis has the potential to support faster diagnosis and enhance healthcare delivery, particularly in underserved or resource-limited regions. Originality/value This study provides a practical evaluation of hybrid quantum-classical models applied to multiple real medical imaging datasets in a reproducible simulated environment. It offers an early-stage framework demonstrating how QML techniques can be integrated into existing machine learning pipelines for medical image analysis.
The prompt detection of neurodegenerative diseases (NDDs) like Alzheimer's Disease (AD), Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), and Parkinson's Disease (PD) is essential yet difficult. This research proposes a hybrid quantum-classical machine learning methodology to categorize NDD using multimodal brain imaging data.ADNI and PPMI datasets' MRI, PET, and fMRI images were preprocessing by Python-based tools such as Scikit-image, SimpleITK, and FreeSurfer via Nipype. Major steps were denoising, registration, normalization, segmentation, and extraction of features from structural and functional imaging. Training was done with a Quantum Support Vector Machine (QSVM) using Qiskit's ZZFeatureMap and QuantumKernel and compared with a conventional SVM. Performance measures-precision, recall, F1-score, class accuracy, AUC, and 10-fold cross-validation-were calculated. QSVM performed better than the standard SVM on all metrics, with 91.25% overall accuracy and macro F1-score of 0.913 as opposed to 87.75% and 0.879 for the SVM. The results validate QSVM's advantage in handling complex, high-dimensional neuroimaging data and its relevance to aiding clinical diagnosis. Keywords: Quantum Machine Learning, Neuroimaging, QSVM, Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease, Multimodal Classification
Deep learning techniques have significantly enhanced medical image classification for disease diagnosis. However, traditional deep learning models face several challenges, such as dependence on large annotated datasets, complex architectural layers, and millions of trainable parameters, which can increase computational load and cause overfitting. Although quantum computing offers potential for parallel processing and improved feature representation, its practical use is limited by the current capabilities of Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) hardware. To overcome these issues, Hybrid Quantum–Classical Convolutional Neural Networks (HQCNNs) have been developed, using quantum properties like superposition and entanglement to improve feature extraction and classification of medical images. This review offers a thorough analysis of 50 peer-reviewed studies published from 2021 to 2026 and introduces a taxonomy of HQCNN architectures. It classifies existing approaches into three categories: Quantum-to-Classical, Classical-to-Quantum, and Hybrid Quantum Transfer Learning. The studies reviewed encompass a diverse range of medical imaging applications, including binary and multi-class disease classification using X-ray, CT, MRI, ultrasound, dermoscopic, retinal, and mammographic images. Additionally, the review compares HQCNNs with their classical CNN counterparts, exploring how factors like quantum circuit design, dataset size, class imbalance, task complexity, evaluation protocols, and hardware limitations influence classification performance. It concludes with an analysis of the key limitations of current HQCNN models, discusses challenges in deploying NISQ devices practically, and proposes future research directions to bridge the gap between experimental HQCNN frameworks and reliable clinical diagnostic systems.