Quantum Machine Learning (QML) is an emerging discipline at the intersection of quantum computing and artificial intelligence, providing new approaches to address the increasing computational and analytical challenges in healthcare. This chapter explores how quantum principles, such as superposition, entanglement, and interference, can enhance the efficiency and accuracy of machine learning when applied to complex biomedical data. It presents an overview of the fundamental concepts of QML, compares its capabilities with those of traditional machine learning systems, and examines important algorithmic frameworks, including Quantum Support Vector Machines, Quantum Neural Networks, and Variational Quantum Algorithms. Practical examples are explored across several healthcare domains—drug discovery, medical imaging, genomic research, patient monitoring, and hospital resource management—showing how quantum methods are beginning to improve data interpretation and clinical decision-making. The chapter also outlines current limitations related to hardware capacity, data preparation, interpretability, and regulatory standards, while emphasizing ethical and cybersecurity considerations that accompany quantum-enabled systems. Finally, it looks ahead to a future in which accessible quantum computing, open-source development, and collaboration among scientists, clinicians, and technologists drive a new generation of personalized, secure, and data-driven healthcare.
Quantum Machine Learning (QML) is an emerging discipline at the intersection of quantum computing and artificial intelligence, providing new approaches to address the increasing computational and analytical challenges in healthcare. This chapter explores how quantum principles, such as superposition, entanglement, and interference, can enhance the efficiency and accuracy of machine learning when applied to complex biomedical data. It presents an overview of the fundamental concepts of QML, compares its capabilities with those of traditional machine learning systems, and examines important algorithmic frameworks, including Quantum Support Vector Machines, Quantum Neural Networks, and Variational Quantum Algorithms. Practical examples are explored across several healthcare domains—drug discovery, medical imaging, genomic research, patient monitoring, and hospital resource management—showing how quantum methods are beginning to improve data interpretation and clinical decision-making. The chapter also outlines current limitations related to hardware capacity, data preparation, interpretability, and regulatory standards, while emphasizing ethical and cybersecurity considerations that accompany quantum-enabled systems. Finally, it looks ahead to a future in which accessible quantum computing, open-source development, and collaboration among scientists, clinicians, and technologists drive a new generation of personalized, secure, and data-driven healthcare.
The growing volume of biomedical data from electronic health records, medical imaging, genomic sequencing, wearable Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices, and precision medicine has created new opportunities as well as significant computational challenges for healthcare. This chapter explores how Quantum Machine Learning (QML) can complement conventional machine learning by improving the analysis of complex, high-dimensional healthcare data through hybrid quantum–classical approaches. It introduces the fundamentals of quantum computing and discusses their application in genomics, medical imaging, drug discovery, IoMT-enabled healthcare, and cybersecurity. The chapter also presents an integrated framework that brings together quantum-enabled analytics, secure communication, and clinical decision support, while highlighting current challenges, ethical considerations, and future directions such as fault-tolerant quantum computing, explainable quantum AI, federated quantum learning, and post-quantum healthcare security.
Quantum machine learning (QML) has emerged as a transformative paradigm that leverages quantum mechanical phenomena superposition, entanglement, and quantum interference to enhance computational approaches in healthcare. This comprehensive survey systematically examines advances in QML for healthcare applications from 2020 to 2025, analyzing cutting-edge algorithms, recent implementations, and emerging prospects across drug discovery, medical imaging, genomics, and clinical decision support. We review Quantum Support Vector Machines (QSVM), Variational Quantum Circuits (VQC), Quantum Neural Networks (QNN), and hybrid quantum-classical frameworks. Our analysis of 150+ recent publications reveals significant theoretical progress alongside persistent hardware constraints and algorithmic challenges. We provide a comprehensive taxonomy of QML algorithms, a comparative performance analysis against classical baselines, a detailed examination of NISQ-era limitations, and a technology roadmap spanning near-term hybrid approaches through long-term fault-tolerant quantum computing. This survey serves as an updated reference for researchers and practitioners navigating the rapidly evolving intersection of quantum computing and medical informatics.
Medical decision-making is increasingly integrating quantum computing (QC) and machine learning (ML) to analyze complex datasets, improve diagnostics, and enable personalized treatments. While QC holds the potential to accelerate optimization, drug discovery, and genomic analysis as hardware capabilities advance, current implementations remain limited compared to classical computing in many practical applications. Meanwhile, ML has already demonstrated significant success in medical imaging, predictive modeling, and decision support. Their convergence, particularly through quantum machine learning (QML), presents opportunities for future advancements in processing high-dimensional healthcare data and improving clinical outcomes. This review examines the foundational concepts, key applications, and challenges of these technologies in healthcare, explores their potential synergy in solving clinical problems, and outlines future directions for quantum-enhanced ML in medical decision-making.
Abstract Quantum computing and artificial intelligence (AI) are converging to reshape the future of healthcare. Modern medicine generates vast and complex datasets from imaging, genomics, wearable sensors, and real-time clinical records. While AI has already demonstrated significant potential in diagnostics, drug discovery, and personalised medicine, its progress is often constrained by high computational demand, limited interpretability, and energy inefficiency. Quantum computing offers a fundamentally different paradigm, using qubits, superposition, and entanglement to process high-dimensional data and explore solution spaces in parallel. This synergy-quantum-enhanced AI or quantum machine learning (QML)promises transformative capabilities across the healthcare continuum. This narrative review explores the foundations of quantum computing, the evolution of AI in medicine, and the points where these technologies intersect. Applications span a range of biomedical domains. In radiology and pathology, quantum-assisted classifiers can enhance both the speed and interpretability of image analysis. In drug discovery and genomics, variational quantum eigensolvers and hybrid quantum–classical models may accelerate molecular simulations and genome-wide association studies. In personalized medicine, quantum kernel methods enable more precise phenotype clustering and improve the accuracy of treatment response predictions. Operationally, quantum-AI integration also supports hospital logistics, ICU resource allocation, and supply-chain resilience. Despite these opportunities, significant challenges remain, including hardware limitations, data encoding bottlenecks, interpretability deficits, and regulatory ambiguity. Ethical concerns around privacy, equity, and compliance with frameworks such as HIPAA and GDPR must also be addressed. By mapping opportunities and risks, this review underscores that quantum-AI is no longer speculative but an emerging reality. Harnessing its potential requires multidisciplinary collaboration to translate qubits and algorithms into tangible improvements in patient outcomes, clinical trust, and system efficiency.
As the limits of classical machine learning (ML) become increasingly evident—especially in terms of computational scalability and data processing—quantum computing emerges as a promising frontier capable of addressing these challenges. Quantum Machine Learning (QML) represents the intersection of quantum computing and traditional ML, aiming to leverage quantum phenomena such as superposition, entanglement, and quantum parallelism to enhance learning capabilities, accelerate training, and solve complex problems that are intractable for classical algorithms. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the evolving field of QML, beginning with the theoretical foundations of quantum computing and its synergy with classical machine learning principles. We explore key QML algorithms, including quantum support vector machines (QSVM), variational quantum classifiers (VQC), quantum neural networks (QNN), and hybrid quantum-classical approaches that exemplify the practical integration of both paradigms. We further examine real-world applications of QML across domains such as drug discovery, finance, climate modeling, and optimization, where quantum enhancements have begun to show early but promising results. Despite its theoretical potential, QML faces substantial limitations, including quantum hardware instability, limited qubit scalability, noise sensitivity, and unresolved challenges in quantum data encoding and interpretability. In synthesizing recent advancements and persistent obstacles, this paper highlights the importance of continued interdisciplinary research, algorithmic refinement, and hardware evolution. We also outline future directions that could lead QML from experimental promise to practical utility, including developments in quantum error correction, benchmarking standards, and application-specific quantum architectures
The growing digitalization of medical diagnostics has resulted in massive amounts of complicated data, including medical imaging and genomic sequences, clinical writing and real-time patient monitoring. Classical machine learning (CML) has achieved amazing success in evaluating such data. But its computational restrictions hinder scalability and efficiency when dealing with high-dimensional biomedical problems. Quantum machine learning (QML) combines the principles of quantum computing (QC) with advanced learning algorithms to offer a transformative paradigm for digital healthcare. This paper provides a systematic overview of QML foundations including quantum data encoding (QDC), variational quantum circuits (VQC), kernel methods, and hybrid quantum classical models. This paper also focuses on their applications in medical imaging, genomics, natural language processing (NLP) for electronic health records, drug discovery and healthcare security. We present comparative insights between classical and quantum approaches such as slow processing of high-dimensional data, limited scalability and inefficiency in complex optimization problems. This review also emphasizes the emerging directions towards quantum-based personalized digital healthcare approaches. By combining medical science with quantum QML has the potential to revolutionize the future of precision diagnostics, treatment optimization and healthcare data security. This study also provides a valuable resource for those interested in quantum computing and researchers who want to stay updated on the fast-growing area.