Quantum-Enhanced Cancer Detection for Histopathologic Images
Nandika Goyal, Glen S. Uehara, Andreas Spanias
This paper investigates quantum image processing for histopathological cancer detection, focusing on enhanced feature extraction and improved classification. We propose a hybrid quantum-classical framework in which quantum preprocessing circuits, specifically, Quantum Hadamard Edge Detection (QHED) and the Quantum Fourier Transform (QFT), extract subtle spatial and spectral features from hematoxylin and eosin-stained whole-slide images. These quantum-enhanced features are then classified using deep neural networks such as ResNet-50, VGG-16, and UNet. Experiments on the PatchCamelyon dataset demonstrate that quantum-enhanced preprocessing increases sensitivity in detecting cancerous regions, while integrating hybrid preprocessing with an SVM classifier further improves classification accuracy. Although quantum noise remains a challenge, our results highlight the promise of quantum image pre-processing and feature extraction for advancing histopathological image classification.
Proceedings - International Conference on Image Processing•Aug 18, 2025•4 citations