Brain tumor image classification is an essential pre-processing task for tumor diagnosis and treatment planning. In medical imaging, quantum computing analyse medical imaging data, offering potential speedups and new representations compared to classical methods. The brain images are transformed through resizing and normalization to a uniform 32 × 32 × 3 resolution. Subsequently, these processed images are converted into vectors to enable encoding into quantum states. The feature set is reduced using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to ensure compatibility with the restricted qubit count in the quantum circuits. Through amplitude encoding, these vectors are mapped to quantum states, allowing for a compact and efficient data representation within the quantum domain. A parameterized Variational Quantum Circuit(VQC), consisting of entangling gates and trainable rotations, processes the encoded quantum states to learn features that can effectively discriminate between classes. The loss is calculated from the measured expectation values of Pauli-Z observables and optimized using classical gradient descent, where the objective function is the mean squared error. The trained quantum model is designed for multi-class classification, specifically distinguishing between meningioma, glioma tumors, pituitary tumors, and the absence of a tumor. The outcome of this proposed work demonstrates the VQC’s advantage over classical baselines, including Random Forest, and Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP). The VQC achieved the highest accuracy of 95% and the best robustness (Specificity 0.983). Crucially, the VQC accomplished this using only 24 trainable parameters, showcasing a significant increase in parameter efficiency compared to the classical models. The novelty of this work is the quantitative demonstration that a custom-designed, resource-efficient quantum model can outperform established classical deep learning methods in both performance and efficiency for complex medical image classification. The VQC provides a 3.5-fold gain in parameter efficiency, achieving the highest accuracy of 95% using only 24 trainable parameters. This efficiency is enabled by the novel application of amplitude encoding to the medical images, which compresses 16 features into just 4 qubits. The VQC demonstrates robustness vital for medical diagnostics, achieving a Specificity of 0.983. Its shallow architecture is also NISQ-friendly and remains stable by avoiding the Barren Plateau issue (Gradient Norm: 0.11), validating the path toward quantum advantage in diagnostic tools. The results of this approach highlight the potential amplitude encoding in quantum machine learning, as a feasible and effective method for classifying real-world medical images. This work also opens avenues for future hybrid quantum-classical diagnostic systems that could utilize richer quantum state encodings for significant gains in computational efficiency and accuracy.
Brain tumor image classification is an essential pre-processing task for tumor diagnosis and treatment planning. In medical imaging, quantum computing analyse medical imaging data, offering potential speedups and new representations compared to classical methods. The brain images are transformed through resizing and normalization to a uniform 32 × 32 × 3 resolution. Subsequently, these processed images are converted into vectors to enable encoding into quantum states. The feature set is reduced using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to ensure compatibility with the restricted qubit count in the quantum circuits. Through amplitude encoding, these vectors are mapped to quantum states, allowing for a compact and efficient data representation within the quantum domain. A parameterized Variational Quantum Circuit(VQC), consisting of entangling gates and trainable rotations, processes the encoded quantum states to learn features that can effectively discriminate between classes. The loss is calculated from the measured expectation values of Pauli-Z observables and optimized using classical gradient descent, where the objective function is the mean squared error. The trained quantum model is designed for multi-class classification, specifically distinguishing between meningioma, glioma tumors, pituitary tumors, and the absence of a tumor. The outcome of this proposed work demonstrates the VQC’s advantage over classical baselines, including Random Forest, and Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP). The VQC achieved the highest accuracy of 95% and the best robustness (Specificity 0.983). Crucially, the VQC accomplished this using only 24 trainable parameters, showcasing a significant increase in parameter efficiency compared to the classical models. The novelty of this work is the quantitative demonstration that a custom-designed, resource-efficient quantum model can outperform established classical deep learning methods in both performance and efficiency for complex medical image classification. The VQC provides a 3.5-fold gain in parameter efficiency, achieving the highest accuracy of 95% using only 24 trainable parameters. This efficiency is enabled by the novel application of amplitude encoding to the medical images, which compresses 16 features into just 4 qubits. The VQC demonstrates robustness vital for medical diagnostics, achieving a Specificity of 0.983. Its shallow architecture is also NISQ-friendly and remains stable by avoiding the Barren Plateau issue (Gradient Norm: 0.11), validating the path toward quantum advantage in diagnostic tools. The results of this approach highlight the potential amplitude encoding in quantum machine learning, as a feasible and effective method for classifying real-world medical images. This work also opens avenues for future hybrid quantum-classical diagnostic systems that could utilize richer quantum state encodings for significant gains in computational efficiency and accuracy.
Accurate and computationally efficient classification of brain tumors from MRI scans is critical for deployment in resource-constrained clinical settings, where conventional deep CNN architectures-despite achieving strong accuracy-often require large parameter counts that limit scalability. This work proposes a hybrid quantum-classical deep learning framework that combines a classical convolutional feature extractor with a variational quantum circuit (VQC) for multi-class tumor classification. Spatial features extracted by the CNN backbone will be dimensionality-reduced and encoded into quantum states using angle encoding; a parameterized quantum circuit will then process these features in a higher-dimensional Hilbert space, leveraging superposition and entanglement to capture non-linear feature correlations. Measurement outputs from the quantum layer will be passed to a classical fully connected layer for classification into glioma, meningioma, pituitary tumor, and no-tumor categories. The proposed framework will be evaluated on a publicly available benchmark MRI dataset and benchmarked against state-of-the-art classical CNN architectures in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and parameter efficiency. This study aims to demonstrate that quantum-enhanced layers can achieve competitive classification performance while substantially reducing trainable parameters, offering a practical direction for efficient, quantum-assisted medical image analysis.
The problem of classifying brain tumours using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a fundamental one in the field of computeraided diagnosis, since although many commonly employed convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures provide high accuracy they contain a large number of parameters, which has led to a search for more compact network designs. In this paper a hybrid quantum–classical approach is proposed that combines a lightweight CNN feature extractor with a trainable variational quantum circuit (VQC) in order to carry out four-class brain tumour classification. The MRI images are resized to 128 by 128 pixels and then processed by a small three-block CNN that reduces each image to an 8-dimensional feature vector. This vector is put into an 8-qubit quantum register by means of angle embedding and then acted on by a variational circuit composed of strongly entangling layers, by measuring each qubit in the Pauli-Z basis. The quantum features thus obtained are then fed into classical dense layers that categorise the images as glioma, meningioma, pituitary tumour or no tumour. The framework was tested on the Brain Tumor MRI dataset (7,200 images) and compared with a classical CNN baseline that was trained under the same conditions. The hybrid model reached a test accuracy of 76.88%, as compared to 72.31% for the classical baseline an improvement of 4.57 percentage points together with corresponding increases in macro-averaged precision, recall and F1-score. Notably, the hybrid model needed only 72 additional trainable parameters when compared to the classical baseline. The fact that the quantum layer was assessed using a noiseless simulator rather than on actual quantum hardware means that these results should be seen as indicating the feasibility of using compact quantum feature transformations for medical image classification rather than as showing a quantum advantage.
This research work discusses three methods for detecting brain tumors using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) - a pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN) baseline, a pure quantum machine learning (QML) classifier that utilizes amplitude embedding and variational quantum circuits, and a hybrid of QML with CNN backbone model with a parameterised quantum circuit (PQC). All models were trained and tested on the four-class brain tumor MRI dataset (glioma, meningioma, pituitary, and no tumor) using the same preprocessing and evaluation protocols. The typical classical convolutional neural network (CNN) baseline achieved a test accuracy of 86.1%, with an F1 score of 0.8512. By comparison, the pure QML model provided a rather poor model, achieving limited accuracy of 44.7% and F1 of 0.4320, largely due to issues with shallow variational circuits and amplitude encoding on higher-dimensional data. The hybrid CNN-QML model provided the best results, achieving a test accuracy of 94.9% and an F1 of 0.9469, surpassing the typical classical baseline. These results indicate while standalone QML models are currently limited by the expressivity of quantum circuits and the scalability of their dimensionality, hybrid quantum-classical models can increase medical image classification performance, even when starting from a strong classical baseline.
The characterization of brain tumors from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is crucial for diagnosis, treatment planning, and prognosis. But the analysis of brain tumors based on MRI is still difficult because of the significant intra-tumoral heterogeneity, ambiguous boundaries of lesions, high dimensionality of imaging features, and complicated nonlinear relationships between anatomical structures. While transformer-based deep learning (DL) models have greatly advanced automated tumor analysis, classical feature representations often fail to effectively capture complex feature interactions in pathological images, especially when distinguishing between subtle pathological variations and normal tissue needs to be done efficiently. Recent quantum machine learning (QML) developments indicate that quantum feature encoding can map complex data to exponentially larger Hilbert spaces, leading to a more expressive representation of nonlinear patterns and feature correlations that are challenging to model with conventional architectures. Encouraged by this potential, this study proposes a hybrid quantum-classical framework, named QFormer-Brain, which combines transformer-based segmentation with quantum representation learning for automated brain tumor segmentation and classification. To segment the tumor regions, a Shifted Window UNet Transformers (Swin-UNETR) architecture is first used to capture both local anatomical details and global contextual information through hierarchical self-attention. Then, the deep semantic features of the segmented lesions are mapped to the quantum feature mapping module with angle encoding and variational quantum circuits (VQCs), which can obtain richer nonlinear feature representation by quantum superposition and entanglement mechanisms. The obtained quantum embeddings are then combined with features obtained from the transformer and classified by a Quantum Transformer Classifier. The experiments were performed on the publicly available BraTS 2021 data set using an 8-qubit variational quantum circuit, with 1024 measurement shots and readout-error mitigation, via the IBM Qiskit Aer simulator. The proposed framework achieved a Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 97.1%, Intersection-over-Union (IoU) of 95.0%, classification accuracy of 98.5%, sensitivity of 98.1%, specificity of 99.0%, and F1-score of 98.3%, outperforming U-Net, nnU-Net, ResNet50, Vision Transformer (ViT), and conventional hybrid Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based models. These results show that quantum-inspired representation learning can be efficiently integrated into transformer-based models to boost the discriminative feature extraction from complex MRI data.
Brain tumor detection from MRI images is a critical and challenging task in medical diagnostics, where early identification greatly improves treatment outcomes. This paper presents a Hybrid Quantum– Classical Convolutional Neural Network (HQCNN) that integrates the strengths of ResNet-18 and a Variational Quantum Circuit for efficient and accurate tumor classification. The proposed model first employs ResNet-18 as a classical feature extractor, where 17 convolutional layers and pooling operations capture both low-level and high-level spatial features from MRI images. The final fully connected layer of ResNet-18 is replaced by a quantum processing layer implemented using PennyLane. In this layer, the extracted classical features are encoded onto qubits using RY rotation gates, while CNOT gates introduce entanglement between them, forming a VQC with trainable parameters. After quantum computation, Pauli-Z measurements convert the processed quantum states back into classical values, which are passed to a final fully connected layer for binary classification as Tumor or No Tumor. The hybrid integration of classical CNN feature learning with quantum entanglement– based representation enhances model generalization and interpretability. Experimental analysis demonstrates that the proposed HQCNN achieved 94.65% accuracy, outperforming traditional CNN models and confirming the potential of hybrid quantum–classical architectures for reliable and interpretable medical image diagnosis.
This research presents a new hybrid model that combines the capabilities of a pre-trained ResNet-50 with a Quantum Neural Network (QNN) to enhance the classification of MRI brain images for tumor recognition. Combining conventional deep learning and quantum computing, this technique competes with traditional models regarding accuracy, speed, and computational effectiveness. The ResNet-50 architecture is the foundation for feature extraction, using its demonstrated ability to handle challenging MRI image data. ResNet-50's linear layer weights are converted into angular parameters to take advantage of the potential of quantum computing, allowing the quantum layer to function within a six-angle depth framework. This unique integration allows the model to efficiently execute binary classification and multi-class tumor detection. The hybrid model outperforms conventional models, providing quicker processing speeds and higher classification accuracy, especially when dealing with high-dimensional and noisy data. The model optimizes 512-dimensional data using four qubits, allowing for improved feature representation and better insights into complicated medical imaging patterns. The quantum layer's resistance to noise enhances the model's accuracy, establishing a new standard for medical diagnostic tools. This novel integration of classical and quantum approaches offers a significant advance in MRI-based tumor identification, providing higher performance and opening the path for next-generation medical imaging systems.