Breast cancer remains the leading cause of cancer-related mortality among women worldwide, necessitating the meticulous examination of mammograms by radiologists to characterize abnormal lesions. This manual process demands high accuracy and is often time-consuming, costly, and error-prone. Automated image segmentation using artificial intelligence offers a promising alternative to streamline this workflow. However, most existing methods are supervised, requiring large, expertly annotated datasets that are not always available, and they experience significant generalization issues. Thus, unsupervised learning models can be leveraged for image segmentation, but they come at a cost of reduced accuracy, or require extensive computational resourcess. In this paper, we propose the first end-to-end quantum-enhanced framework for unsupervised mammography medical images segmentation that balances between performance accuracy and computational requirements. We first introduce a quantum-inspired image representation that serves as an initial approximation of the segmentation mask. The segmentation task is then formulated as a QUBO problem, aiming to maximize the contrast between the background and the tumor region while ensuring a cohesive segmentation mask with minimal connected components. We conduct an extensive evaluation of quantum and quantum-inspired methods for image segmentation, demonstrating that quantum annealing and variational quantum circuits achieve performance comparable to classical optimization techniques. Notably, quantum annealing is shown to be an order of magnitude faster than the classical optimization method in our experiments. Our findings demonstrate that this framework achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art supervised methods, including UNet-based architectures, offering a viable unsupervised alternative for breast cancer image segmentation.
Breast cancer remains the leading cause of cancer-related mortality among women worldwide, necessitating the meticulous examination of mammograms by radiologists to characterize abnormal lesions. This manual process demands high accuracy and is often time-consuming, costly, and error-prone. Automated image segmentation using artificial intelligence offers a promising alternative to streamline this workflow. However, most existing methods are supervised, requiring large, expertly annotated datasets that are not always available, and they experience significant generalization issues. Thus, unsupervised learning models can be leveraged for image segmentation, but they come at a cost of reduced accuracy, or require extensive computational resourcess. In this paper, we propose the first end-to-end quantum-enhanced framework for unsupervised mammography medical images segmentation that balances between performance accuracy and computational requirements. We first introduce a quantum-inspired image representation that serves as an initial approximation of the segmentation mask. The segmentation task is then formulated as a QUBO problem, aiming to maximize the contrast between the background and the tumor region while ensuring a cohesive segmentation mask with minimal connected components. We conduct an extensive evaluation of quantum and quantum-inspired methods for image segmentation, demonstrating that quantum annealing and variational quantum circuits achieve performance comparable to classical optimization techniques. Notably, quantum annealing is shown to be an order of magnitude faster than the classical optimization method in our experiments. Our findings demonstrate that this framework achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art supervised methods, including UNet-based architectures, offering a viable unsupervised alternative for breast cancer image segmentation.
Breast cancer remains has the major health concern at global level, ranking as one of the most cancer among women worldwide and is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths.In 2022, it has affected 2.3 million women across the globe and lead to more than 670,000 deaths [1].Faster Early detection is crucial for effective treatment, medication and also can improve patient survival rates [3].For example, survival rates for localized breast cancer can exceed 90%, whereas advanced stages have significantly lower levels of risk.Traditional breast cancer diagnosis often could rely on the rigorous examination of imaging, such as mammograms and tomographs, making radiologists to identify and categorize abnormality of lesions.This manual process of checking is very timeconsuming, costlier and susceptible to human errors and variation because of radiologist's fatigue.The complexity of breast tissues, varying appearances of masses such as shape, margins, intensity and other subtle detail makes accurate manual differentiation between benign and malignant challenging to find.
Cancer is the leading cause of premature mortality. Globally, the prevalence of cancer is on the rise, and early-stage diagnosis is crucial for cancer recovery and survival. However, the presence of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) and heterogeneity within the tumor makes it hard to track how cancer changes over time and how resistance to treatment develops. Unfortunately, the cancer diagnosis precision remains inadequate, endangering precious human lives and necessitating costly procedures for accurate treatment. Machine learning (ML) has proven capable of discovering meaningful information and making predictions, particularly with large datasets. Moreover, quantum computers (QCs) inherently possess superposition and parallel computation, features not found in classical computing. Researchers have demonstrated that quantum neural networks (QNNs) achieve a significantly better effective dimension than classical NNs. In this context, this study investigates the application of classical and quantum machine learning (QML) algorithms to classify breast cancer images. Region-based segmentation is used to identify regions of interest and image processing algorithms are performed on segmented breast cancer images to extract meaningful features (e.g., perimeter, area, compactness). An user interface (UI) based software is created to swiftly distinguish benign and malignant instances during image analysis. Although QNNs perform poorly than the classical NNs, there is still a long way to go in developing feature maps and techniques for better performance. In contrast, the classical NNs have gone a long way with well-established algorithms and packages available to us. This research shows that with further development, QML has the potential to enhance cancer diagnosis accuracy and speed, ultimately improving early detection and treatment outcomes.
Breast cancer is one of the most prevalent and life-threatening diseases affecting women worldwide, and early detection plays a crucial role in improving survival rates and treatment outcomes.Conventional diagnostic methods such as mammography, ultrasound imaging, and histopathological analysis rely heavily on expert interpretation and classical machine learning techniques.Although classical deep learning models, especially Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), have demonstrated impressive performance in medical image analysis, they face inherent limitations related to computational complexity, scalability, and the curse of dimensionality when handling large, high-resolution datasets.With the rapid advancement of quantum computing, Quantum Machine Learning (QML) has emerged as a promising paradigm capable of addressing these challenges by leveraging quantum phenomena such as superposition and entanglement.This research explores the application of Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks (Quantum CNNs or QCNNs) for breast cancer detection, aiming to enhance classification accuracy while reducing computational overhead.The proposed approach integrates quantum circuits with classical preprocessing techniques to extract discriminative features from breast cancer datasets, such as mammographic or histopathological images.By encoding image features into quantum states and performing convolution operations through parameterized quantum circuits, the Quantum CNN model is designed to learn complex patterns more efficiently than classical counterparts.The study evaluates the effectiveness of Quantum CNNs in distinguishing between benign and malignant breast tumors and compares its performance with traditional CNN models.The findings highlight the potential of Quantum CNNs to revolutionize medical image analysis by offering faster convergence, improved generalization, and robustness against noise.This research contributes to the growing field of quantumassisted healthcare systems and demonstrates how quantum computing can be harnessed to address critical challenges in breast cancer diagnosis.
Breast cancer is one among the most common diseases that are encountered in the world and one of the principal causes of death among women, early detection being crucial to enhance survival rates but mammograms are an important tool that can save lives by finding breast cancer at its earliest stages but the manual evaluation is dependent on a radiologist's clear interpretation and analysis of which sometimes erroneously or misses the key findings. This research work deals with breast cancer detection from mammogram images and hence provides a solution for the issues identified by training Quantum Convolutional Neural Network (Quantum CNN). Quantum CNNs is recently being integrated with classical deep learning models in the form of Quantum CNN where quantum mechanical properties are used to support feature extraction and data handling. This research work trains the Quantum CNN using publicly available datasets, including the CBIS-DDSM Breast Cancer Image Dataset and the Breast Histopathology Images dataset. Key methods used include data preprocessing techniques such as Region of Interest (ROI) extraction, morphological operations, and quantum-enhanced convolutional layers for image classification. The proposed model demonstrates improved accuracy and computational efficiency over classical CNNs, making it a promising tool for more accurate and faster breast cancer detection.
Cancer remains one of the leading causes of mortality worldwide, making early and accurate detection a critical challenge in medicine. Recent advances in quantum computing have opened new avenues for enhancing machine learning techniques in medical imaging and diagnosis. In this work, we apply quantum machine learning models, including Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks (QCNN), to the task of breast cancer detection using ultrasound images. We designed and implemented a hybrid pipeline combining classical preprocessing techniques with quantum-enhanced classification. Our experiments were conducted on real medical imaging datasets, and the results demonstrate the potential of quantum approaches to improve diagnostic accuracy over classical baselines. This research lies at the intersection of quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and medical image analysis, and highlights the promise of quantum-enhanced methods in addressing complex healthcare problems.
Abstract Image segmentation remains one of the most extensively studied problems in computer vision, with applications ranging from medical image analysis and autonomous driving to remote sensing and industrial inspection. While deep learning approaches currently dominate the field, interest in quantum computing has motivated the development of quantum and quantum-inspired segmentation techniques that explore alternative strategies for image representation, optimization, and learning. This survey provides a comprehensive review of quantum and quantum-inspired image segmentation methods within the broader context of modern segmentation research. To establish this context, we first examine the evolution of image segmentation methodologies, covering classical image processing techniques, machine learning approaches, and contemporary deep learning architectures.We then organize the existing quantum image segmentation literature into four categories: quantum-inspired, tensor network-based, hybrid quantum-classical, and fully quantum methods. Across these categories, we analyze computational principles, image encoding and representation strategies, application domains, and datasets. We further compare quantum and quantum-inspired approaches with established segmentation paradigms in terms of supervision, scalability, and hardware requirements. Our analysis indicates that quantum-inspired methods currently represent the most developed direction, while hybrid approaches are emerging and fully quantum methods remain constrained by quantum hardware, data encoding costs, and scalability challenges. By connecting quantum image segmentation with the broader evolution of segmentation research, this survey provides a unified perspective on the field. It identifies current trends, open challenges, and promising future directions for researchers exploring the emerging role of quantum computing in image segmentation.