Abstract:In biomedical engineering, artificial intelligence has become a pivotal tool for enhancing medical diagnostics, particularly in medical image classification tasks such as detecting pneumonia from chest X-rays and breast cancer screening. However, real-world medical datasets frequently exhibit severe class imbalance, where positive samples substantially outnumber negative samples, leading to biased models with low recall rates for minority classes. This imbalance not only compromises diagnostic accuracy but also poses clinical misdiagnosis risks. To address this challenge, we propose SDA-QEC (Simplified Diffusion Augmentation with Quantum-Enhanced Classification), an innovative framework that integrates simplified diffusion-based data augmentation with quantum-enhanced feature discrimination. Our approach employs a lightweight diffusion augmentor to generate high-quality synthetic samples for minority classes, rebalancing the training distribution. Subsequently, a quantum feature layer embedded within MobileNetV2 architecture enhances the model's discriminative capability through high-dimensional feature mapping in Hilbert space. Comprehensive experiments on coronary angiography image classification demonstrate that SDA-QEC achieves 98.33% accuracy, 98.78% AUC, and 98.33% F1-score, significantly outperforming classical baselines including ResNet18, MobileNetV2, DenseNet121, and VGG16. Notably, our framework simultaneously attains 98.33% sensitivity and 98.33% specificity, achieving a balanced performance critical for clinical deployment. The proposed method validates the feasibility of integrating generative augmentation with quantum-enhanced modeling in real-world medical imaging tasks, offering a novel research pathway for developing highly reliable medical AI systems in small-sample, highly imbalanced, and high-risk diagnostic scenarios.
Abstract:Medical image artificial intelligence models often achieve strong performance in single-center or single-device settings, yet their effectiveness frequently deteriorates in real-world cross-center deployment due to domain shift, limiting clinical generalizability. To address this challenge, we propose a lightweight domain generalization framework with quantum-enhanced collaborative learning, enabling robust generalization to unseen target domains without relying on real multi-center labeled data. Specifically, a MobileNetV2-based domain-invariant encoder is constructed and optimized through three key components: (1) multi-domain imaging shift simulation using brightness, contrast, sharpening, and noise perturbations to emulate heterogeneous acquisition conditions; (2) domain-adversarial training with gradient reversal to suppress domain-discriminative features; and (3) a lightweight quantum feature enhancement layer that applies parameterized quantum circuits for nonlinear feature mapping and entanglement modeling. In addition, a test-time adaptation strategy is employed during inference to further alleviate distribution shifts. Experiments on simulated multi-center medical imaging datasets demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms baseline models without domain generalization or quantum enhancement on unseen domains, achieving reduced domain-specific performance variance and improved AUC and sensitivity. These results highlight the clinical potential of quantum-enhanced domain generalization under constrained computational resources and provide a feasible paradigm for hybrid quantum--classical medical imaging systems.
Abstract:Intelligent medical image analysis is essential for clinical decision support but is often limited by scarce annotations, constrained computational resources, and suboptimal model generalization. To address these challenges, we propose a lightweight medical image classification framework that integrates self-supervised contrastive learning with quantum-enhanced feature modeling. MobileNetV2 is employed as a compact backbone and pretrained using a SimCLR-style self-supervised paradigm on unlabeled images. A lightweight parameterized quantum circuit (PQC) is embedded as a quantum feature enhancement module, forming a hybrid classical-quantum architecture, which is subsequently fine-tuned on limited labeled data. Experimental results demonstrate that, with only approximately 2-3 million parameters and low computational cost, the proposed method consistently outperforms classical baselines without self-supervised learning or quantum enhancement in terms of Accuracy, AUC, and F1-score. Feature visualization further indicates improved discriminability and representation stability. Overall, this work provides a practical and forward-looking solution for high-performance medical artificial intelligence under resource-constrained settings.
Abstract:Background: Coronary angiography (CAG) is the cornerstone imaging modality for evaluating coronary artery stenosis and guiding interventional decision-making. However, interpretation based on single-frame angiographic images remains highly operator-dependent, and conventional deep learning models still face challenges in modeling complex vascular morphology and fine-grained texture patterns.Methods: We propose a Lightweight Quantum-Enhanced ResNet (LQER) for binary classification of coronary angiography images. A pretrained ResNet18 is employed as a classical feature extractor, while a parameterized quantum circuit (PQC) is introduced at the high-level semantic feature space for quantum feature enhancement. The quantum module utilizes data re-uploading and entanglement structures, followed by residual fusion with classical features, enabling end-to-end hybrid optimization with a strictly controlled number of qubits.Results: On an independent test set, the proposed LQER outperformed the classical ResNet18 baseline in accuracy, AUC, and F1-score, achieving a test accuracy exceeding 90%. The results demonstrate that lightweight quantum feature enhancement improves discrimination of positive lesions, particularly under class-imbalanced conditions.Conclusion: This study validates a practical hybrid quantum--classical learning paradigm for coronary angiography analysis, providing a feasible pathway for deploying quantum machine learning in medical imaging applications.
Abstract:Background: Coronary angiography (CAG) is a cornerstone imaging modality for assessing coronary artery disease and guiding interventional treatment decisions. However, in real-world clinical settings, angiographic images are often characterized by complex lesion morphology, severe class imbalance, label uncertainty, and limited computational resources, posing substantial challenges to conventional deep learning approaches in terms of robustness and generalization.Methods: The proposed framework is built upon a pretrained convolutional neural network to construct a lightweight hybrid neural representation. A selective neural plasticity training strategy is introduced to enable efficient parameter adaptation. Furthermore, a brain-inspired attention-modulated loss function, combining Focal Loss with label smoothing, is employed to enhance sensitivity to hard samples and uncertain annotations. Class-imbalance-aware sampling and cosine annealing with warm restarts are adopted to mimic rhythmic regulation and attention allocation mechanisms observed in biological neural systems.Results: Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed lightweight brain-inspired model achieves strong and stable performance in binary coronary angiography classification, yielding competitive accuracy, recall, F1-score, and AUC metrics while maintaining high computational efficiency.Conclusion: This study validates the effectiveness of brain-inspired learning mechanisms in lightweight medical image analysis and provides a biologically plausible and deployable solution for intelligent clinical decision support under limited computational resources.