Quantum machine learning for Healthcare 5.0: Opportunities, challenges, and future directions
Thippa Reddy Gadekallu, Brij B. Gupta, Pronaya Bhattacharya +9 more
Healthcare 5.0 combines artificial intelligence, the Internet of Medical Things, edge and cloud computing, and digital twins to support safer, more personal, and more efficient care. Interest in quantum machine learning is growing in this space, but the current evidence is fragmented and hard to compare across studies. Many reports focus on small tasks, use weak or inconsistent baselines, and do not separate algorithmic gains from costs caused by data encoding, repeated circuit execution, and hardware noise. This survey addresses these gaps by providing a structured synthesis of Healthcare 5.0 applications and by offering a practical comparison between classical machine learning and quantum machine learning using criteria that matter for clinical use. We review representative use cases in medical imaging, electronic health record based prediction, remote monitoring, decision support, and digital twin enabled systems. We then analyze QML integration patterns that are realistic today, with emphasis on hybrid pipelines where classical models extract features and quantum components act as narrow decision or optimization modules. Finally, we consolidate the barriers that currently limit adoption, including encoding overhead, limited qubit counts and circuit depth, training instability and reproducibility, privacy and governance constraints, and the need for careful benchmarking and reporting. We conclude with guidance on evaluation and study design to support fair comparison, clearer clinical relevance, and better alignment with Healthcare 5.0 engineering requirements.
Array•Oct 21, 2026•0 citations