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BMC Artificial Intelligence

Overcoming SVM limitations in lung cancer classification with a quantum feature map

Achraf Toufah, Mohamed Achraf Kadim, Moulay Youssef El Hafidi

Published Dec 9, 2025• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Background Lung cancer is a leading cause of cancer mortality, and early detection is critical for patient outcomes. Support Vector Machines (SVM) have been widely applied to diagnostic classification, but their performance can be limited in terms of sensitivity. Quantum Support Vector Machines (QSVM) offer a potential approach to improve this aspect. Methods We compared SVM and QSVM on balanced lung cancer subsets (1,000 samples each) using k-fold cross-validation. QSVM employed ZZFeatureMap and FidelityQuantumKernel for quantum feature encoding. Results QSVM achieved an average recall improvement of about 8% over classical SVM, while maintaining comparable precision and accuracy. Under a realistic 1:100 class imbalance, precision declined, highlighting challenges with highly skewed data. Conclusion QSVM shows promise for enhancing sensitivity in medical diagnostics but requires further validation on larger, heterogeneous datasets and real quantum hardware. Clinical trial number Not applicable.

DOI
10.1186/s44398-025-00016-3

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Background: Classical algorithms often struggle with the high dimensionality of medical data critical for early lung cancer diagnosis. While Quantum Machine Learning (QML) offers enhanced pattern recognition capabilities, the impact of specific quantum feature encoding strategies on diagnostic accuracy remains underexplored.Methods: We evaluated Quantum Support Vector Machines (QSVM) using a dataset of 309 lung cancer patients, divided into six balanced subsets to mitigate class imbalance. Models were implemented on a qasm simulator, comparing three encoding strategies: ZFeatureMap, ZZFeatureMap, and PauliFeatureMap. Performance was assessed using standard classification metrics.Results: The choice of feature map significantly influenced model efficacy. The PauliFeatureMap outperformed other kernels, achieving 100% classification accuracy in three of the six subsets, whereas ZFeatureMap and ZZFeatureMap yielded lower predictive consistency.Conclusion: Quantum feature map selection is a decisive factor in QSVM performance. Specifically, the PauliFeatureMap demonstrates high separability for medical data, highlighting the potential of optimized quantum kernels to improve diagnostic precision.
Abstract In this study, we compare the performance of classical Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Quantum Support Vector Machines (QSVM) on binary classification tasks, using 149 balanced datasets derived from a lung cancer diagnosis dataset. Each dataset consists of 120 samples and 12 features. Our primary objective is to evaluate whether QSVM provides measurable advantages over SVM, particularly in low-performing scenarios. To this end, we identified the 15 datasets where classical SVM exhibited the lowest F1-scores and conducted a focused comparative analysis. Results show that, in these challenging cases, QSVM achieved an average recall improvement of 99% over SVM, without compromising precision. This substantial gain in recall also led to a corresponding 48% increase in F1-score, on average. Statistical analysis using a normality test followed by a paired t-test confirmed the significance of these results. These findings suggest that QSVM can serve as a valuable alternative in situations where classical models struggle, especially when high recall is critical for early cancer detection.
In recent years, quantum machine learning has emerged as a promising intersection between quantum physics and artificial intelligence, particularly in domains requiring advanced pattern recognition such as healthcare. This study investigates the effectiveness of Quantum Support Vector Machines (QSVM), which leverage quantum mechanical phenomena like superposition and entanglement to construct high-dimensional Hilbert spaces for data classification. Focusing on lung cancer diagnosis, a concrete and critical healthcare application, we analyze how different quantum feature maps influence classification performance. Using a real-world dataset of 309 patient records with significant class imbalance (39 non-cancer vs. 270 cancer cases), we constructed six balanced subsets for robust evaluation. QSVM models were implemented using Qiskit and executed on the qasm simulator, employing three distinct quantum feature maps: ZFeatureMap, ZZFeatureMap, and PauliFeatureMap. Performance was assessed using accuracy, precision, recall, specificity, and F1-score. Results show that the PauliFeatureMap consistently outperformed the others, achieving perfect classification in three subsets and strong performance overall. These findings demonstrate how quantum computational principles can be harnessed to enhance diagnostic capabilities, reinforcing the importance of physics-based modeling in emerging AI applications within healthcare.
Abstract This study addresses the urgent need for improved prostate cancer detection methods by harnessing the power of advanced technological solutions. We introduce the application of Quantum Support Vector Machine (QSVM) to this critical healthcare challenge, showcasing an enhancement in diagnostic performance over the classical Support Vector Machine (SVM) approach. Our study not only outlines the remarkable improvements in diagnostic performance made by QSVM over the classic SVM technique, but it delves into the advancements brought about by the quantum feature map architecture, which has been carefully identified and evaluated, ensuring it aligns seamlessly with the unique characteristics of our prostate cancer dataset. This architecture succeded in creating a distinct feature space, enabling the detection of complex, non-linear patterns in the data. The findings reveal not only a comparable accuracy with classical SVM (92%) but also a 7.14% increase in sensitivity and a notably high F1-Score (93.33%). This study's important combination of quantum computing in medical diagnostics marks a pivotal step forward in cancer detection, offering promising implications for the future of healthcare technology.
The application of machine learning has shown significant progress in various fields, including clinical data classification. This study presents a comparative analysis between the classical Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Quantum Support Vector Machine (QSVM) for breast cancer classification using the Wisconsin Diagnostic Breast Cancer (WDBC) dataset. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was applied as dimension reduction strategy across three configurations (PCA = 2, PCA = 4, and PCA = 6) to evaluate the sensitivity of both models to the feature space dimension. Preprocessing included log1p transformation on 22 skewed features, Manual SMOTE balancing, and MinMaxScaler normalization. SVM was optimized via GridSearchCV (80 parameter combinations, cv = 5), while QSVM employed a ZZFeatureMap quantum kernel (reps = 2, entanglement = full) on qasm_simulator. Experimental results demonstrate that SVM achieved superior accuracy across all configurations, with peak performance at PCA = 6 (Accuracy= 98.83%, AUC = 0.9985, Specificity = 1.0000, Sensitivity = 0.9688, Precision = 1.0000, NPV = 0.9817, and F1-score for malignant = 0.98). QSVM achieved its highest accuracy at PCA = 4 (92.98%), AUC = 0.9622, Sensitivity = 0.9219, Precision = 0.8939, NPV = 0.9524, and F1-score for malignant = 0.91. Across the three PCA configurations, QSVM exhibited a non-monotonic relationship between PCA dimensions and quantum kernel performance . These findings provide a quantitative benchmark for comparing quantum and classical machine learning in breast cancer diagnosis.
This study addresses the urgent need for improved prostate cancer detection methods by harnessing the power of advanced technological solutions. We introduce the application of Quantum Support Vector Machine (QSVM) to this critical healthcare challenge, showcasing an enhancement in diagnostic performance over the classical Support Vector Machine (SVM) approach. Our study not only outlines the remarkable improvements in diagnostic performance made by QSVM over the classic SVM technique, but it delves into the advancements brought about by the quantum feature map architecture, which has been carefully identified and evaluated, ensuring it aligns seamlessly with the unique characteristics of our prostate cancer dataset. This architecture succeded in creating a distinct feature space, enabling the detection of complex, non-linear patterns in the data. The findings reveal not only a comparable accuracy with classical SVM (92%92\%92%) but also a 7.14%7.14\%7.14% increase in sensitivity and a notably high F1-Score (93.33%93.33\%93.33%). This study's important combination of quantum computing in medical diagnostics marks a pivotal step forward in cancer detection, offering promising implications for the future of healthcare technology.