The state of quantum computing applications in health and medicine

作者：Frederik F. Flöther · 发表于：Research Directions Quantum Technologies · 年份：2023 · DOI：10.1017/qut.2023.4 · 被引用次数：106 · 研究领域：Genetics, Bioinformatics, and Biomedical Research

Abstract Quantum computing hardware and software have made enormous strides over the last years1. Questions around quantum computing’s impact on research and society have changed from “if” to “when/how”. The 2020s have been described as the “quantum decade”, and the first production solutions that drive scientific and business value are expected to become available over the next years. Medicine, including fields in healthcare and life sciences, has seen a flurry of quantum-related activities and experiments in the last few years (although medicine and quantum theory have arguably been entangled ever since Schrödinger’s cat2). The initial focus was on biochemical and computational biology problems3,4,5,6,7,8; 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 from the last few years. 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, for instance, quantum support vector classifiers and quantum neural networks, have been t...