Project plots a quantum leap to bridge healthcare gap

The University of Western Australia is part of an international consortium that hopes to harness quantum computing technology to give remote Aboriginal communities access to higher quality medical imaging – in turn delivering faster and more accurate diagnoses.

The consortium is one of four nationally to secure a feasibility grant following a Federal Government callout for quantum solutions that improve life expectancy, health outcomes and access to health technology for First Nations peoples.

The callout was issued as part of the Critical Technologies Challenge Program (CTCP), which provides grant funding to support solutions to market-led national challenges using rapidly developing quantum technologies.

Quantum physicist and consortium member Professor Jingbo Wang, from UWA’s School of Physics, Mathematics and Computing, said remote communities currently faced limited access to high-quality diagnostic imaging.

Those needing to access such care faced disruptive long-distance travel and delayed diagnoses.

“While communities may have access to portable, wireless ultrasound machines, the resulting images are often of sub-optimal quality,” Professor Wang said.

“Our project aims to use quantum computing to not only reconstruct higher-resolution images but also to identify subtle, hidden patterns that traditional methods often miss.”

The multidisciplinary consortium includes quantum software companies Q-CTRL and Quantinuum LLC, the North Metropolitan Health Service, Australia’s National Imaging Facility, and UWA researchers from the Medical Physics group at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital, School of Physics, Mathematics and Computing, and School of Engineering.

Other supporters of the project include Amazon’s quantum computing platform AWS and Indigenous innovation not-for-profit First Nations X.

“It’s a vibrant and diverse consortium, united by our shared passion for the project and our complementary strengths,” Professor Wang said.

The CTCP program works in two stages, with the first offering feasibility grants that allow consortia to test and demonstrate the technical viability of their proposed solution to one of four specific challenges.

In the second stage, successful projects will be invited to apply for demonstrator grants, which help them build on their feasibility project and produce working prototypes or demonstrations.

The consortium will use its $432,453 feasibility grant to explore high-powered quantum solutions to the computational bottlenecks and limitations faced by traditional image and signal processing techniques when dealing with large or complex datasets.

Professor Wang said classical algorithms often struggled to process massive amounts of information in real-time, handle the inherent noise in signals, and efficiently extract subtle features from complex images.

“Quantum algorithms have the potential to significantly speed up certain computational tasks, enabling faster, more accurate and efficient processing of such information, which is critical in fields like medical diagnostics,” she said.

If successful, the quantum software that emerges from the project could ultimately apply beyond ultrasound images to other kinds of medical imaging and to other fields, including radar, sonar, wireless communications and environmental monitoring.