Numerous studies have analyzed the use of hybrid quantum-classical convolutional neural networks as a promising alternative to classical deep learning. However, network components on quantum hardware impose fundamental limitations, while the scalability of quantum circuits leads to trainability issues. In this work, we investigate whether small, classically-emulated quantum circuit components can play a meaningful role within complex models, offering an alternative to purely classical convolutional architectures. To this end, we present a systematic study of the effectiveness of a Hybrid Quantum-inspired Convolutional Neural Network (HQiCNN) compared with a parameter-matched classical Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that differs only in an intermediate dense neural layer. Both models are evaluated on two real-world medical datasets while systematically varying the different hyperparameters, ensuring a fair model comparison that is both dataset and hyperparameter independent. The results show that no architecture consistently dominates the other: the HQiCNN achieves its largest gains in intermediate-data regimes, whereas the CNN reaches the highest accuracies for the largest training sets in both datasets. Furthermore, removing entanglement produces comparable performance while enabling substantially better scalability of quantum simulations, and richer observable sets become beneficial only when sufficient training data are available. Finally, we propose two SHAP-based explainability tools for comparing the predictions between both models,
∣SHAP∣IoU and
EMDpos metric, to demonstrate that both architectures consistently attend to anatomically plausible regions. Thus, we provide a comprehensive benchmark showing that, under certain conditions, hybrid quantum-inspired models are an alternative that can offer benefits in practical tasks such as medical image classification.
Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks (QCNNs) have became a promising field for quantum advantage in feature extraction and classification of different datasets like Handwritten datasets, Fashion datasets, particularly useful for complex datasets like medical images. Medical image classification has emerged as a critical component in modern healthcare diagnostics, particularly for tumor detection and cancer diagnosis. Normally, Classical CNN is used for image classification but they may face certain challenges in achieving further improvements in accuracy, computational efficiency, processing time. Also, it becomes difficult to train for high-dimensional medical datasets and extracting complex feature representations. Therefore, In this proposal, Image classification through a Scalable and Resource efficient QCNN is proposed which integrates classical CNN with quantum computing. This review examines the current state of medical image classification for tumor detection, analyzes the transition from classical CNNs to quantum-based architectures, and explores the potential of QCNNs in revolutionizing medical diagnostics. This research includes QCNN architecture which will include selective feature encoding using encoding technique such as Z Feature map and quantum circuits for convolutional layers and pooling layers to handle multi-modal medical data (e.g., MRI and CT scans). We aim to achieve superior accuracy with reduced parameters over classical CNNs. This work advances quantum ML toward practical deployment in resource-limited healthcare settings.
This research presents a hybrid quantum-classical machine learning framework for medical image classification under noisy conditions using chest X-ray images. A classical Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model and a hybrid quantum-classical model integrating variational quantum circuits were implemented using PyTorch and PennyLane. Gaussian noise was introduced during validation to evaluate model robustness under image perturbations. Experimental results demonstrated comparable performance between the classical CNN and the hybrid quantum-classical model, highlighting the potential of Quantum Machine Learning (QML) for future healthcare AI applications. GitHub Repository:https://github.com/saichandukundarapu/quantum-covid-detection