The state of quantum computing applications in health and medicine

Abstract

Medicine, including fields in healthcare and life sciences, has seen a flurry of quantum-related activities and experiments in the last few years (although biology and quantum theory have arguably been entangled ever since Schrödinger's cat). The initial focus was on biochemical and computational biology problems; recently, however, clinical and medical quantum solutions have drawn increasing interest. The rapid emergence of quantum computing in health and medicine necessitates a mapping of the landscape. In this review, clinical and medical proof-of-concept quantum computing applications are outlined and put into perspective. These consist of over 40 experimental and theoretical studies. The use case areas span genomics, clinical research and discovery, diagnostics, and treatments and interventions. Quantum machine learning (QML) in particular has rapidly evolved and shown to be competitive with classical benchmarks in recent medical research. Near-term QML algorithms have been trained with diverse clinical and real-world data sets. This includes studies in generating new molecular entities as drug candidates, diagnosing based on medical image classification, predicting patient persistence, forecasting treatment effectiveness, and tailoring radiotherapy. The use cases and algorithms are summarized and an outlook on medicine in the quantum era, including technical and ethical challenges, is provided.

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• The state of quantum computing applications in health and medicine
• Towards quantum computing for clinical trial design and optimization: A perspective on new opportunities and challenges
• How quantum computing can enhance biomarker discovery
• Reduced-order modeling of two-dimensional turbulent Rayleigh-Bénard flow by hybrid quantum-classical reservoir computing
• QOPTLib: a Quantum Computing Oriented Benchmark for Combinatorial Optimization Problems
• Quantum computing for genomics: conceptual challenges and practical perspectives
• Robust Quantum Reservoir Computing for Molecular Property Prediction
• Quantum enhanced stratification of Breast Cancer: exploring quantum expressivity for real omics data