Abstract
Quantum machine learning holds the potential to revolutionize cancer treatment and diagnostic imaging by uncovering complex patterns beyond the reach of classical methods. This study explores the effectiveness of quantum convolutional layers in classifying ultrasound breast images for cancer detection. By encoding classical data into quantum states through angle embedding and employing a robustly entangled 9-qubit circuit design with an SU(4) gate, we developed a Quantum Convolutional Neural Network (QCNN) and compared it to a classical CNN of similar architecture. Our QCNN model, leveraging two quantum circuits as convolutional layers, achieved an impressive peak training accuracy of 76.66% and a validation accuracy of 87.17% at a learning rate of 1 × 10(-2). In contrast, the classical CNN model attained a training accuracy of 77.52% and a validation accuracy of 83.33%. These compelling results highlight the potential of quantum circuits to serve as effective convolutional layers for feature extraction in image classification, especially with small datasets.