Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs) are a promising tool for addressing the limitations of their classical counterparts in many applications, including healthcare. However, most existing approaches rely on gradient-based optimization methods, which require a large number of quantum circuit calls and are affected by barren plateaus, limiting their applicability on current Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices. This work investigates Evolutionary Quantum Neural Networks (EQNNs) for heart disease classification using the Cleveland dataset. The proposed framework replaces gradient-based training with a Genetic Algorithm (GA), enabling parameter optimization without explicit gradient computation and reducing the dependence of training cost on the number of circuit parameters. Experimental results compare the GA with the ADAM optimizer across different circuit sizes and under both ideal and noisy execution conditions using a mock IBM backend. The results demonstrate that EQNNs achieve competitive classification performance while significantly reducing the number of required quantum circuit evaluations, highlighting their potential as a resource-efficient solution for medical diagnosis on NISQ devices.
Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs) are a promising tool for addressing the limitations of their classical counterparts in many applications, including healthcare. However, most existing approaches rely on gradient-based optimization methods, which require a large number of quantum circuit calls and are affected by barren plateaus, limiting their applicability on current Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices. This work investigates Evolutionary Quantum Neural Networks (EQNNs) for heart disease classification using the Cleveland dataset. The proposed framework replaces gradient-based training with a Genetic Algorithm (GA), enabling parameter optimization without explicit gradient computation and reducing the dependence of training cost on the number of circuit parameters. Experimental results compare the GA with the ADAM optimizer across different circuit sizes and under both ideal and noisy execution conditions using a mock IBM backend. The results demonstrate that EQNNs achieve competitive classification performance while significantly reducing the number of required quantum circuit evaluations, highlighting their potential as a resource-efficient solution for medical diagnosis on NISQ devices.
Quantum Machine Learning represents a promising approach to address complex computational challenges beyond classical computing capabilities. In this study, we investigate its application to healthcare, focusing specifically on the classification of cardiovascular diseases. Classical Machine Learning methods often struggle with high-dimensional data, resulting in limited accuracy and reduced generalization, especially in real-world medical scenarios. To overcome these issues, we propose a Hybrid Quantum-Neural Network that combines classical Autoencoders for dimensionality reduction with Quantum Neural Networks, facilitating effective data processing compatible with current NISQ hardware. Evaluated on the Cleveland dataset, our HQNN achieves state-of-the-art classification accuracy up to 90.98%, outperforming purely classical counterparts by capturing complex feature relationships in the quantum domain. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed HQNN model in scenarios characterized by limited training data and realistic noisy quantum environments, performing robustness analyses and simulations using IBM’s quantum hardware framework. These findings highlight the practical advantages of our Hybrid Quantum-Neural Network, underscoring its suitability and immediate applicability for real-world healthcare scenarios. The code is made publicly available.
Heart disease morbidity and mortality rates are increasing, which has a negative impact on public health and the global economy. Early detection of heart disease reduces the incidence of heart mortality and morbidity. Recent research has utilized quantum computing methods to predict heart disease with more than 5 qubits and are computationally intensive. Despite the higher number of qubits, earlier work reports a lower accuracy in predicting heart disease, have not considered the outlier effects, and requires more computation time and memory for heart disease prediction. To overcome these limitations, we propose hybrid random forest quantum neural network (HQRF) using a few qubits (two to four) and considered the effects of outlier in the dataset. Two open-source datasets, Cleveland and Statlog, are used in this study to apply quantum networks. The proposed algorithm has been applied on two open-source datasets and utilized two different types of testing strategies such as 10-fold cross validation and 70-30 train/test ratio. We compared the performance of our proposed methodology with our earlier algorithm called hybrid quantum neural network (HQNN) proposed in the literature for heart disease prediction. HQNN and HQRF outperform in 10-fold cross validation and 70/30 train/test split ratio, respectively. The results show that HQNN requires a large training dataset while HQRF is more appropriate for both large and small training dataset. According to the experimental results, the proposed HQRF is not sensitive to the outlier data compared to HQNN. Compared to earlier works, the proposed HQRF achieved a maximum area under the curve (AUC) of 96.43% and 97.78% in predicting heart diseases using Cleveland and Statlog datasets, respectively with HQNN. The proposed HQRF is highly efficient in detecting heart disease at an early stage and will speed up clinical diagnosis.
Classical neural networks (NNs) have shown strong performance in medical data analysis. However, they typically require large labeled datasets and may struggle in data-scarce scenarios, common in clinical practice. Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs) have emerged as a promising alternative. This paper presents a comparative study between NNs and QNNs for heart disease prediction, addressing the limitations of current models in low-data regimes. We systematically evaluate 460 QNNs (using 11-13 qubits) and 4,480 NN architectures, analyzing key design parameters: encoding schemes, re-uploading strategies, circuit depth, and dropout (for QNNs), as well as hidden layers, neurons per layer, and dropout (for classical NNs). Top-performing models are selected for a direct comparison in terms of accuracy and sample complexity. Our results show QNNs achieve comparable accuracy and demonstrate potential advantages in data-scarce settings. Our study presents a structured and reproducible methodology for evaluating QNNs in clinical contexts, thereby supporting the broader investigation of quantum machine learning in applied healthcare domains.
Heart disease is one of the major global causes of death, requiring early and precise detection for efficient treatment.With advancements in quantum computing, Variational Quantum Circuits (VQCs) have gained recognition as a valuable technique for improving learning models in medical diagnosis.This study further explores the application of VQC-based models for heart disease prediction, leveraging quantum computing to enhance classification accuracy.A hybrid quantum-classical model has been developed, which combines classical preprocessing for feature extraction from patient datasets with a VQC-based classifier for medical predictions.The quantum circuit using variational parameters is optimized to reduce the loss function and facilitate effective learning from complex medical data.This proposed approach is tested on benchmark heart disease datasets and evaluated against classical Machine Learning (ML) models, including Support Vector Machines (SVMs), Random Forests, and Neural Networks.The experimental results show that VQC-based models achieve high accuracy and outperform classical models, notably on high-dimensional, non-linearly separable data.The quantum advantage of VQCs lies in their ability to encode and process data in a huge Hilbert space.However, challenges such as noise in near-term quantum devices and scalability issues remain key.This research underscores the efficacy of VQCbased quantum machine learning in medical diagnosis, paving the way for future studies on quantum-enhanced healthcare solutions.Further advancements in quantum hardware and hybrid learning techniques could allow quantum-assisted heart disease prediction to become an effective clinical tool.
We introduce Genetic Transformer Assisted Quantum Neural Networks (GTQNNs), a hybrid learning framework that combines a transformer encoder with a shallow variational quantum circuit and automatically fine tunes the circuit via the NSGA-II multi objective genetic algorithm. The transformer reduces high-dimensional classical data to a compact, qubit sized representation, while NSGA-II searches for Pareto optimal circuits that (i) maximize classification accuracy and (ii) minimize primitive gate count an essential constraint for noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) hardware. Experiments on four benchmarks (Iris, Breast Cancer, MNIST, and Heart Disease) show that GTQNNs match or exceed state of the art quantum models while requiring much fewer gates for most cases. A hybrid Fisher information analysis further reveals that the trained networks operate far from barren plateaus; the leading curvature directions increasingly align with the quantum subspace as the qubit budget grows, confirming that the transformer front end has effectively condensed the data. Together, these results demonstrate that GTQNNs deliver competitive performance with a quantum resource budget well suited to present-day NISQ devices.
Variational Quantum Circuits (VQCs) are viable alternatives for implementing quantum circuits in current quantum processors. VQCs are reduced circuits with parameters that are trained to minimize a loss function for a given problem. In this work, we propose an approach to optimize the parameters of a VQC using Genetic Algorithms (GAs). We explored different GA configurations, on 3 databases - Sonar, Cancer and Banknotes datasets, comparing the proposed approach with 2 classical optimizers based on gradient descent. The results show that genetic algorithms can effectively optimize the weights of variational circuits to achieve high classification accuracy with convergence speed up to 7.3 times (in Sonar Database), 4.8 times (Cancer Database), and 3.7 times (Banknote Database) compared with the traditional optimizers. The experimental results indicate that the genetic algorithm achieves performance metrics that are significantly superior or at least comparable to those obtained by gradient descent-based optimizers, demonstrating the potential and robustness of evolutionary strategies in training variational quantum circuits.