Analyzing Images of Blood Cells with Quantum Machine Learning Methods: Equilibrium Propagation and Variational Quantum Circuits to Detect Acute Myeloid Leukemia

Abstract

This paper presents a feasibility study demonstrating that quantum machine learning (QML) algorithms achieve competitive performance on real-world medical imaging despite operating under severe constraints. We evaluate Equilibrium Propagation (EP), an energy-based learning method that does not use backpropagation (incompatible with quantum systems due to state-collapsing measurements) and Variational Quantum Circuits (VQCs) for automated detection of Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) from blood cell microscopy images using binary classification (2 classes: AML vs. Healthy). Key Result: Using limited subsets (50-250 samples per class) of the AML-Cytomorphology dataset (18,365 expert-annotated images), quantum methods achieve performance only 12-15% below classical CNNs despite reduced image resolution (64x64 pixels), engineered features (20D), and classical simulation via Qiskit. EP reaches 86.4% accuracy (only 12% below CNN) without backpropagation, while the 4-qubit VQC attains 83.0% accuracy with consistent data efficiency: VQC maintains stable 83% performance with only 50 samples per class, whereas CNN requires 250 samples (5x more data) to reach 98%. These results establish reproducible baselines for QML in healthcare, validating NISQ-era feasibility.