The state of quantum computing applications in health and medicineQuantum computing hardware and software have made enormous strides over the
last years. 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 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 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 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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