Adversarial attacks on hybrid classical-quantum Deep Learning models for Histopathological Cancer Detection
This work addresses the robustness of cancer detection models for medical applications, but it is incremental as it combines existing quantum and classical methods without a major breakthrough.
The paper tackled histopathological cancer detection by applying hybrid classical-quantum deep learning models and testing them under adversarial attacks, finding that these hybrid models achieved better accuracy than classical models in such scenarios.
We present an effective application of quantum machine learning in histopathological cancer detection. The study here emphasizes two primary applications of hybrid classical-quantum Deep Learning models. The first application is to build a classification model for histopathological cancer detection using the quantum transfer learning strategy. The second application is to test the performance of this model for various adversarial attacks. Rather than using a single transfer learning model, the hybrid classical-quantum models are tested using multiple transfer learning models, especially ResNet18, VGG-16, Inception-v3, and AlexNet as feature extractors and integrate it with several quantum circuit-based variational quantum circuits (VQC) with high expressibility. As a result, we provide a comparative analysis of classical models and hybrid classical-quantum transfer learning models for histopathological cancer detection under several adversarial attacks. We compared the performance accuracy of the classical model with the hybrid classical-quantum model using pennylane default quantum simulator. We also observed that for histopathological cancer detection under several adversarial attacks, Hybrid Classical-Quantum (HCQ) models provided better accuracy than classical image classification models.