Quantum Computing in Healthcare
How quantum computing will support key healthcare initiatives in the future
While listening in on Canada’s ground-breaking Digital Health & Discovery Platform (DHDP), a collaboration of 90 partners including the Federal Government to apply big data and AI to healthcare, I was reminded of an article I co-authored in 2020 about the use of quantum computing in Covid research.
First, the DHDP is astounding in its breadth and scope of health-based and AI organizations coming together to develop a federated data platform where sensitive patient data goes unshared and there’s a priority emphasis on privacy amongst partners. Here’s the link to this new Canadian organization.
In the 2020 article, Mahmood Qasmi my co-author and I reviewed the importance of quantum computing both now and into the future as it related to healthcare. It’s certainly acknowledged quantum computing is a relatively new technology, and in many cases been referred to as immature given the amount of ‘noise’, error reduction requirements, lack of available talent, lack of standardization, hardware costs and availability. Like Artificial Intelligence of a few years ago, concern around hype and inaccuracies remain factors in pursuing the technology as a viable solution. Yet every day breakthroughs are occurring and noise and errors are being reduced. Qubits (the quantum equivalent of digital bits) capacity is increasing, as are the number of applications/use cases, communities and hardware advances. Large organizations are including quantum computing as part of their long-term strategy, but also with a fast-maturing ecosystem, considering more immediate applications.
Combining Quantum & AI
Artificial intelligence offers healthcare an incredible analytic tool however there’s a challenge of relying on AI and classical computing within the health system strategy. We affirmed “Machine Learning and AI have shown great promise in providing optimal solutions for such problems. However, the multidimensional nature of travelling salesperson (TSP) modeling stops classical computers dead in its tracks. For example, solving for the optimal route of a salesman to visit 33,000 simulated destinations could take more than 15 years on a modern classical computer. Interestingly, quantum computing is ideally-suited to tackle such problems. Foremost example of this is a small-scale near-real-time TSP solutionobtained using D-Wave’s quantum computer . If fully implemented, such computers could help in the fight against future epidemics to provide optimal solutions to vaccine and medication distribution models in real-time. That would certainly enable rapid mobilization of mass treatment regimen to help healthcare providers halt the spread of infectious diseases — not unlike how wild fires are put out today.”
The Potential Benefits for Healthcare:
Quantum computing has a vital role in research and drug development, both present and future. Being able to aggregate vast amounts of data, whether at a population level, or individual patient level through in-presence testing or smart device tracking, is essential to an improved understanding of diseases and their symptoms and effects. Quantum computing can support the analysis of such data pools, in a shorter period of time.
According to Jessica Kent’s “Big Data to See Explosive Growth, Challenging Healthcare Organizations.” which appeared in Health IT Analytics in 2018 suggested healthcare data was growing by 36% annually. The challenge is having so-called clean data that can be leveraged by AI and quantum algorithms. Efforts like DHDP provide hope for solving this challenge.
Centric Consulting, a business and technology consulting firm headquartered in Dayton Ohio, suggests “Quantum’s ability to compute at scale will allow clinicians to incorporate a vast number of cross-functional data sets into their patient risk factor models. For instance, we’ll be able to analyze environmental databases to evaluate the effect of pollution on a patient’s health history.” Centric goes on to suggest leveraging QC for processing imagery at scale, implementing precision medicine recognizing the individual physiology of patients, and selecting patients for clinical trials more accurately.
Further, consider the 2020 report from IBM Institute for Business Value titled “Exploring quantum computing use cases for healthcare: Accelerate diagnoses, personalize medicine, and optimize pricing”. The report argues “As access to health-relevant data sources continues to grow, the potential for the combination of quantum computing and classical modeling to save lives and reduce costs increases.” Imagine adding the DHDP data pool to AI, classical modelling and quantum computing to three key focus areas namely:
Diagnostic assistance: i.e. medical imaging, cell classification, biomarkers and ‘omics”; Precision medicine: personalized customized interventions/treatments; Pricing: improve risk analysis and pricing computations
As Dawn Bell, Global Development Head of Novartis stated at the opening of the DHDP Session on February 24th, 2021 “Drug development is mainly an optimization problem… We need to be better at predicting toxicity and efficacy in humans…” going on to reaffirm the importance of understanding how solutions are predicted to bind to proteins. D-Wave Systems Inc., a quantum computer manufacturer based in Burnaby, BC, is a world-renown for its optimization prows leveraging quantum annealing (one of several approaches to quantum computing). They have to date addressed a number of biological optimization problems including projects such as “Unconventional machine learning of genome-wide human cancer data” and “Quantum Annealing Approach to Molecule Unfolding”.
Conclusion
A resounding celebration of the Canadian spirit to come together to share data in a secure manner through DHDP. By partnering across organizations, combining AI including machine learning with problems in healthcare, DHDP plans to address the age-old data challenges every organization faces and providing a go-forward path. Combining the DHDP approach with quantum computing should offer up a strong dose of hope for global citizens.
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Brian’s upcoming book “Quantum Boost: Using Quantum Computing to Supercharge Your Business” is available for pre-order on Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, and Amazon.ca
Copyright 2021, 2020 Aquitaine Innovation Advisors
Brian Lenahan is the author of four Amazon-published books on artificial intelligence including the Bestseller “Artificial Intelligence: Foundations for Business Leaders and Consultants”. He is a former executive in a Top 10 North American bank, a University Instructor, and mentors innovative companies in the Halton and Hamilton areas. Brian’s training in quantum computers comes from CERN/University of Oviedo, and Technische Universiteit Delft, and he writes extensively on quantum computing. His new book “Quantum Boost: Using Quantum Computing to Supercharge Your Business” will be released in early 2021.
Email: ceo@aquitaineinnovationadvisors.com
Aquitaine Innovation Advisors: www.aquitaineinnovationadvisors.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-lenahan-innovation/
