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Optics and Photonics for Information Processing

Quantum computing meets skin cancer diagnosis

Daniel Alejandro Lopez, Oscar Montiel, Miguel Montiel, Oscar Castillo

Published Oct 4, 2023• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Skin cancer is one of the most common and lethal diseases in America, and its early detection and treatment is the best approach to protect the lives of those afflicted. Computer-Aided Diagnosis systems have been implemented for decades as evidence of intelligent methods applied in the medical field. In recent years, machine and deep learning fields have shown great potential in medical diagnosis, particularly in skin cancer classification. These methods enable the automated extraction of complex input features, such as those in medical imagery. Therefore, with the advent of quantum computing, it is now possible to perform complex computations with increased speed and efficiency. This study explores the application of quantum machine learning in the classification of skin cancer using the ResNet50 model, a deep convolutional neural network for RGB images. The research employs a quantum-enhanced version of ResNet50 using a quanvolutional layer that the input skin lesion images go through and compare its performance with the classical ResNet50 version. We show comparative experiments, and the results indicate that further experiments are needed using more extensice datasets and different quantum deep learning architectures.

DOI
10.1117/12.2675446

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Early diagnosis of breast cancer is crucial to combat its severity. Yet, it’s a challenging endeavor to tackle via traditional diagnosis methods. Several machine learning architectures have already been proposed to assist medical experts in diagnosis. However, architectural complexity hinders the goal of developing a cost-effective diagnosis model. Recently, quantum computing has become popular in machine learning due to its potential computational benefits. Although quantum computing has yet to show any significant improvement in machine learning due to its limited resources and complexity, it may reduce the computational complexity of machine learning in the future. Therefore, we proposed a novel hybrid classical-quantum machine learning model for breast cancer prediction. We collected the BreastMNIST dataset of 780 benign and malignant full-image mammogram samples. Our task is to create an efficient breast cancer-classifying hybrid machine learning model. The proposed method employs a modified ResNet50 as a feature extractor and a Quantum Neural Network to train on that feature and generate desired predictions. A Convolutional layer is applied as a dimension-reduction technique for features generated through ResNet50. Our architecture proved superior to other state-of-the-art hybrid methods, achieving an accuracy of 69% against 67%. An in-depth comparative analysis has been performed that shows the novelty of our research. This study paves the path for hybrid classical-quantum machine learning research in medical image classification.
Cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. Mutations in humans can alter oncogenes or tumor suppressor genes, leading to uncontrolled cell growth. The most common form of cancer is skin cancer which if caught early, is much easier to treat, highlighting the importance of a sophisticated skin cancer detection system. In this study, we propose a novel method to detect skin cancer early, utilizing quantum variational circuits to perform a quantum convolution as a pre-processing step on image data for classical Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to create a hybrid "Quanvolutional" Neural Network. Utilizing a dataset of over 8,100 images which included images of other skin conditions including Herpes Simplex, Burns, Xerosis, folliculitis, and more, our model obtained a validation accuracy of 99.30% for the classification of Skin Cancer. This performance surpasses that of similar, purely classical CNNs, despite the presence of noise from other skin conditions. Our study not only demonstrates significant potential for skin cancer detection, but also the efficiency and effectiveness of quantum pre-processing layers in hybrid Quanvolutional Neural Networks. Future work can utilize our Quantum Machine Learning methods, leading to further breakthroughs within the medical field and quantum computing as a whole.
Skin cancer is the most common and fatal illness globally, and therefore, proper early detection is essential for successful treatment and enhanced patient outcomes. Classic deep learning models, especially Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), have greatly succeeded in medical image classification. However, classic CNNs also suffer from severe limitations such as computational inefficiency, overfitting on small datasets, and redundant feature extraction, which restrict their utility in clinical settings. To overcome these drawbacks, we introduce QAttn-CNN as a quantum–classical deep learning model combining a Quantum Attention Mechanism (QAttn) to improve feature selection and classification accuracy. Our method utilizes Quantum Convolutional Layers (QConv) and Quantum Image Representation (QIR) with Novel Enhanced Quantum Representation (NEQR) encoding to draw upon quantum parallelism and improve computational efficiency and complexity from O(N 2 ) to O(log N). The model is tested on three benchmark datasets: MNIST (70,000 grey-scale handwritten digit images), CIFAR-10 (60,000 RGB object images), and the Kaggle Skin Cancer: Malignant versus Benign dataset (3297 dermoscopic images: 1800 benign and 1497 malignant cases, from the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC) Archive). The dataset images were processed by converting them to grayscale, resizing them bilinearly to 150 × 150 pixels, and normalizing to [0–1] for quantum encoding. QAttn-CNN is contrasted with standard CNNs, QAttn-ViT (Quantum Attention Vision Transformer), and QAttn-ResNet18. Results indicate that QAttn-CNN attains state-of-the-art accuracy of 91% on the Skin Cancer dataset with a precision of 89%, a recall of 89%, and an F1-score of 91%, surpassing Baseline CNN (89% accuracy), QAttn-ViT (87%), and QAttn-ResNet18 (83%). On CIFAR-10, QAttn-CNN exhibits 10% accuracy enhancement over Baseline CNN with accuracy of 82% and 90% precision. On MNIST, QAttn-CNN performs at the peak of 99% accuracy, comparable to classical benchmarks but with greatly diminished computational overhead due to quantum parallelism. This study demonstrates the revolutionary potential of quantum-assisted deep learning in healthcare applications, especially for real-world binary medical image classification problems that identify malignant vs. benign skin lesions.
Multiclass disease classification is a crucial task in medical diagnostics, but achieving high accuracy across diverse disease categories remains challenging. This paper presents a novel approach that integrates Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks (QCNN) with the ResNet architecture to enhance multiclass skin disease classification. The model utilizes quantum computing principles to improve feature extraction and classification performance. We evaluate the model on a dataset comprising 16 skin disease classes from the DermNet dataset, covering both common and rare conditions like acne, melanoma, Eczema, Seborrheic Keratoses, Tinea Ringworm, Bullous disease, Poison Ivy, Psoriasis, Vascular Tumors, etc. Experimental results demonstrate that our QCNN-ResNet model achieves a classification accuracy of 86%, significantly surpassing the 66% accuracy of traditional ResNet models. This improvement is attributed to the enhanced feature representation provided by quantum layers, which capture complex patterns in medical images more effectively. Furthermore, the model exhibits robustness to noisy data, maintaining high accuracy across varying image quality levels. These findings highlight the potential of quantumenhanced neural networks in advancing medical diagnostics. Future research will explore scaling the model to larger datasets and extending its application to other medical imaging domains.
Skin cancer identification and categorization are still open issues in medical image analysis due to ambiguous boundaries, variance in shapes, and strong similarities to non-malignant lesions, which must be acknowledged by any framework supporting the clinical decision making. The proposed Quantum-Enhanced Deep Learning Framework (QDLF) is a new approach that combines Quantum feature encoding and Classical deep learning networks for skin lesion classification. Hereby, the QDLF is compared with the traditional models such as ResNet50, DenseNet, and VGG-16 showing a better performance on the HAM10000 dataset containing 10,015 dermoscopic images with seven lesion categories. Therefore, higher accuracy was achieved in the proposed framework at an accuracy level of 96.2% with F1-score 95.1% and ROC­AUC value of 0.983 as compared to classical approaches. The QDLF uses quantum feature mappings with Variational Quantum Circuits (VQCs) that enables the model to learn abstract non-linear patterns and it incorporates global contextual features from pre-trained CNNs. The use of a mixture of CNN and FNN in this study not only improves the classification efficiency but also cuts down the time taken to train and the number of parameters involved, getting to a convergence point in 36 minutes with 18.5 million of parameters. To further enhance the interpretability of the model, Grad-CAM visualization is employed to identify clinically significant areas of the lesions as well as t-SNE plots showing good distinction in the quantum features space. The findings affirm the effectiveness of QDLF as a method for addressing class imbalance issues, with precision and recall for key classes such as melanoma at 92.7% and 94.1% respectively. Quantum-classical hybrid frameworks presented in this work reveal the uniqueness of the approach to medical image analysis in terms of scalability and applicability to real-life cases. Further studies will focus on implementation on quantum platforms and generalization of this approach to other image processing tasks in medicine.