
Artificial intelligence and quantum computing are part of the technological areas that are improving medicine. In this case, the principles of quantum physics are of great help in the design of scanners for the rapid and accurate diagnosis of diseases. In this way, they help health professionals to detect pathologies that affect tissues at an earlier stage of the disease to avoid later requiring more invasive procedures for their treatment.
By using algorithms, oncologists can make diagnoses with greater precision, increasing performance, and reducing costs. Thus, it is possible to foresee how the disease may evolve in a patient or to determine at what level a certain drug is effective, etc.
But the application of quantum computing is not limited to here in medicine. It goes further and already serves to create new drugs. Let’s see in detail:
Benefits Quantum Computing offers to healthcare industries
As we have discussed, its possibilities are endless. Here we are going to focus on three aspects of the healthcare sector where quantum computing has or will have a direct impact.
Pharmacological treatments
In this area, biotechnology and quantum computing go hand in hand. Promising developments have led to partnerships in this area now. For example, the collaboration between Accenture, quantum software company 1Qbit, and biotech Biogen. The three are designing the first quantum application of medical solutions for multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, or Parkinson’s.
Not only that. Among its most disruptive practices is the design of customized medicines in less time. Currently, the creation of treatments carries a great time cost and a large number of processes. And often many years of laboratory experiments. But, with quantum computing, experts point out that it will be feasible to simulate the effect of different chemical compounds on organisms at the molecular level. And, this reduces costs while making the whole process considerably easier.
Diagnosis
When it comes to disease diagnosis and monitoring, quantum computing is not far behind. Cancer patients often undergo chemotherapy and do not know if the treatment works or not for months. However, thanks to advances in quantum computing, that is changing.
A group of researchers from Case Western Reserve University has developed a technique, together with Microsoft, that is capable of detecting the efficacy of chemotherapy after a single dose. Thus, MRF (Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting) is a technique that makes it possible to evaluate the tissues of magnetic resonance by comparing them with many others already stored.
In this way, it estimates diagnostic results automatically. With the knowledge of a professional who supervises it and the combination of a large number of patterns or stored images, it allows to refine and speed up the diagnosis of diseases without patients having to face invasive procedures. This technique will help you to know the effectiveness of a treatment in minutes or days.
Data management
The quantum computer promotes a key aspect for the health sciences: artificial intelligence. Among its applications, we find big data applied to AI and quantum computing. That is cutting-edge technology that provides the ability to record, sort, and analyze massive amounts of complex data and find patterns in them. The usefulness in health is invaluable. Through its technology, doctors can access more efficient management of health data.
Besides, another fundamental aspect that quantum computing can contribute is related to logistics and organization. Thus, it could decipher the optimal trajectories used in global systems and apply them, for example, to optimize information and data management. That is, identify processes from hundreds of thousands of data and select the most efficient to use. This technology can facilitate and streamline many health processes.
Conclusion
If universal quantum computers can be used in research and development in healthcare in the future, they would probably revolutionize entire development processes. Complex biochemical reactions can be efficiently simulated and reagents can be specifically developed.
The goal of precision medicine, where one tries to combine a wide variety of patient information in order to make the correct diagnosis and to make exactly the right therapy recommendations for this patient, could also bring us a quantum leap with their novel algorithms.