Exploring Quantum Machine Learning for Enhanced Skin Lesion Classification: A Comparative Study of Implementation Methods

Skin diseases affect millions of people worldwide, leading to significant healthcare burdens and challenges in diagnosis and treatment. In the past few years, machine learning techniques have demonstrated potential in assisting dermatologists with diagnosing various skin conditions. As in, conventional machine learning algorithms might encounter challenges in handling the complexity and distinction of skin disease classification tasks, primarily because of the intricate nature of medical image data with its high dimensional properties. In this work, the main analysis is done based on exploring quantum machine learning models for skin disease classification. This approach blends with the aspects of quantum computing with the conventional machine learning techniques to push the boundaries of skin disease classification. This work harnesses the HAM10000 dataset, an extensive compilation of categorized images portraying common skin lesions, to train and assess the efficacy of the proposed methodologies. Quantum computing libraries such as PennyLane and Qiskit is used in this study. Using different combination of qubit rotation encoding and decoding using three types of Pauli gates such as Pauli X, Y and Z gates are implemented and compared using proposed Quanvolutional neural network. Features extracted using MobileNet pre-trained network is used to build Quantum support vector classifier. These quantum machine learning models are compared with some well-known pre-trained models such as Resnet50, Inception-Resnet, Densenet121, DenseNet201 and MobileNet. The combination of RY qubit rotation and PauliZ gate in quantum convolution layer in Quanvolutional neural network produced the optimal classification accuracy of 82.86% more than any other models included in this study. In contrast, Quantum Support Vector Classifier produced similar classification accuracy of 72.5% with respect to pre-trained models.