Multi-modal biomedical imaging has become central to modern diagnostics, offering complementary anatomical, functional, and molecular information through modalities such as MRI, CT, PET, ultrasound, and optical imaging. Yet integrating these heterogeneous datasets remains computationally demanding due to differences in spatial resolution, noise profiles, acquisition dynamics, and high-dimensional feature distributions. This paper investigates AI–quantum hybrid diagnostic systems as an emerging paradigm for multimodal image fusion, reconstruction, and disease classification. By combining deep learning architectures with quantum-enhanced algorithms—including variational quantum circuits, quantum feature encoders, and quantum kernel methods—the hybrid framework aims to accelerate image processing, improve cross-modal consistency, and enhance diagnostic precision. The analysis highlights advancements in quantum-accelerated denoising, multi-modal registration, probabilistic inference, and high-dimensional pattern recognition. It also evaluates workflow integration challenges, such as NISQ-era noise, hardware scalability, and clinical interpretability. Overall, AI–quantum hybrid systems represent a promising frontier in medical imaging, offering potential improvements in speed, sensitivity, and personalized diagnostic accuracy.
Multi-modal biomedical imaging has become central to modern diagnostics, offering complementary anatomical, functional, and molecular information through modalities such as MRI, CT, PET, ultrasound, and optical imaging. Yet integrating these heterogeneous datasets remains computationally demanding due to differences in spatial resolution, noise profiles, acquisition dynamics, and high-dimensional feature distributions. This paper investigates AI–quantum hybrid diagnostic systems as an emerging paradigm for multimodal image fusion, reconstruction, and disease classification. By combining deep learning architectures with quantum-enhanced algorithms—including variational quantum circuits, quantum feature encoders, and quantum kernel methods—the hybrid framework aims to accelerate image processing, improve cross-modal consistency, and enhance diagnostic precision. The analysis highlights advancements in quantum-accelerated denoising, multi-modal registration, probabilistic inference, and high-dimensional pattern recognition. It also evaluates workflow integration challenges, such as NISQ-era noise, hardware scalability, and clinical interpretability. Overall, AI–quantum hybrid systems represent a promising frontier in medical imaging, offering potential improvements in speed, sensitivity, and personalized diagnostic accuracy.
Abstract The convergence of quantum computing and medical image analysis has emerged as a promising frontier for advancing diagnostic intelligence beyond the limits of classical machine learning. Recent developments in quantum hardware and quantum machine learning (QML) algorithms have stimulated growing interest in their potential to enhance complex medical imaging tasks, including disease classification, image segmentation, and clinical decision support (Wei et al., 2023; Ullah and Garcia-Zapirain, 2024). This study presents a comprehensive review and synthesis of state-of-the-art QML methodologies applied to medical imaging, systematically examining both theoretical foundations and empirical implementations. We analyze quantum-based and hybrid quantum–classical models employed across modalities such as MRI, CT, X-ray, and histopathological imaging, with particular attention to classification accuracy, computational efficiency, and diagnostic robustness (Maheshwari et al., 2022; ElBedoui et al., 2025). Our findings reveal clear trends indicating that hybrid quantum–classical approaches currently dominate practical applications, consistently outperforming purely classical baselines in select low-dimensional and domain-specific diagnostic tasks. Performance gains are most evident in feature-rich yet data-constrained scenarios, where quantum kernels and variational circuits demonstrate enhanced representational capacity (Ajlouni et al., 2023; Landman et al., 2022). However, these advantages remain context-dependent and sensitive to noise, circuit depth, and encoding strategies. Overall, QML holds significant promise for improving medical image-based diagnosis, but its widespread clinical adoption is constrained by hardware scalability, limited qubit coherence, and unresolved data encoding challenges. Addressing these limitations will be critical for translating QML from experimental feasibility to routine medical practice (Marengo and Santamato, 2025; Rawas and AlSaeed, 2026).
Quantum-Enhanced Machine Learning (QEML) is a new computational paradigm that introduces the concept of quantum mechanics with the latest artificial intelligence algorithms to enhance the performance of the diagnostic process in the field of medical imaging. The early identification of diseases is crucial in mortality reduction and improving patient outcome, especially in capacities dealing with such diseases as cancer, neurological diseases, heart diseases, and infections of the lungs. Although conventional deep learning architectures, in particular, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been highly successful in processing complex medical images such as MRI scans, CT images, X-rays, and histopathological data, they can be computationally expensive, need large data sets, and suffer in optimization of high dimensional feature spaces. The limitations that QEML tries to overcome are based on the quantum mechanical principles of superposition, entanglement and interference to facilitate better data representation and processing. The suggested structure is based on the classical deep learning architectures and variational quantum circuits together, to create a hybrid quantum-classical system, which improves features extraction and classification levels. Under this method, the classical image characteristics are coded into quantum states and processed in high-dimensional Hilbert spaces, which can enhance the separability of subtle disease patterns, which would have otherwise been challenging to obtain with conventional techniques. The objective of this hybrid system is to enhance the critical diagnostic measures like sensitivity and specificity without affecting the interpretability of such measures to be used in the clinical context. The proposed framework is also assessed in terms of its feasibility, its computational performance and scalability to the capabilities of present-day Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices. The model effectiveness is evaluated using objective evaluation metrics, which, in a way, guarantee the feasibility of the model application within a real-life healthcare context. On balance, quantum computing and medical image analysis integration is an exciting field of work of the future intelligent healthcare systems and has a potential of providing more efficient, accurate, and scalable diagnostic solutions.
Diagnosing multimodal medical conditions necessitates seamlessly integrating the insights of both medical images and physiological signals, aiming to boost disease detection accuracy and efficiency in clinical decision making. However, existing deep learning models struggle to exploit sophisticated cross-modal relations and higher-order feature interactions efficiently and computationally. To overcome such shortcomings, we propose a Quantum-Deep Hybrid Architecture to jointly learn the healthcare signal and image features by incorporating Variational Quantum Circuits (VQCs) into a combined architecture based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and 1D-CNNs. In our approach, medical image data and physiological signal data pass through distinct CNN and 1D-CNN branches to extract spatial and temporal features, respectively. These encoded, lower-dimensional feature vectors are encoded into quantum states via angle encoding and learn quantum-enhanced features via a Variational Quantum Circuit. The derived quantum and classical features are fused via fully connected layers and a softmax activation function for classification. Moreover, we exploit the Bayesian optimization to select the optimum hyper-parameters and integrate both privacy-preserving feature encoding and secure data processing into the framework. Empirical evaluation results reveal that the developed model achieves overall classification accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score of 94.8%, 95.1%, 94.3%, 94.7%, respectively, with an average AUC of 0.968, surpassing the contemporary CNN and multimodal deep learning baselines. Our proposed hybrid model also shows competitive performance under varying levels of noise and demonstrates excellent stability. The results also suggest the developed framework offers an efficient, robust and scalable approach to next-generation multimodal healthcare analytics and intelligent clinical decision-making systems.
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.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing diagnostics by enhancing the capabilities of quantum imaging (QI) and quantum sensors (QS) in healthcare. By leveraging AI-driven algorithms, QI achieves superior image resolution, noise reduction, and real-time data analysis, enabling precise visualization of biological structures and early disease detection. AI’s pattern recognition capabilities facilitate the identification of subtle biomarkers and anomalies critical for diagnosing complex conditions, such as cancer and neurodegenerative diseases. Quantum mechanics underpins these advancements, driving breakthroughs in biosensing through quantum dots (QDs), plasmonic biosensors, and non-classical light, which enhance sensitivity and precision. Advanced techniques like quantum Raman spectroscopy and nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center-based sensors enable cutting-edge molecular detection and diagnostics applications. Furthermore, AI optimizes QS functionality, improving the accuracy of physiological and molecular measurements essential for non-invasive diagnostics. Integrating AI with QI systems reduces operational complexity, accelerates diagnostic workflows, and supports multimodal imaging approaches for comprehensive patient assessments. This review demonstrates the synergy between AI and quantum technologies, representing a transformative leap in medical diagnostics, offering unprecedented precision, speed, and accessibility for improved healthcare outcomes.
Quantum Machine Learning (QML) is an emerging, powerful paradigm at the intersection of quantum computing and artificial intelligence, with the potential to enhance medical image analysis. We compared their performance with classical counterparts, while critically examining the gap between theoretical quantum advantages and the practical constraints of current Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) implementations. This review explored the current landscape of QML-based methodologies applied to key medical imaging modalities - Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Computed Tomography (CT), X-rays, and histopathology. We systematically analyzed how quantum-enhanced models were employed for critical tasks such as image classification, segmentation, and reconstruction, and we compared their performance with that of classical counterparts. The review delved into the architectural innovations that enabled these quantum approaches, including hybrid quantum-classical frameworks, variational quantum circuits, and quantum convolutional neural networks. Particular emphasis was given to the clinical relevance of QML applications, from early diagnostics to real-time surgery planning, and how quantum advantage might influence data efficiency, interpretability, along computational scalability. Finally, we highlighted current challenges in data encoding, noise resilience, and hardware limitations, and discussed promising future directions that could enable the practical deployment of QML in healthcare settings. This comprehensive review aimed to serve as a foundational reference for researchers and practitioners looking to harness quantum computing in medical imaging and precision medicine.