The state of quantum computing applications in health and medicine

Quantum computing hardware and software have made enormous strides over the last years. Questions around quantum computing's impact on research and society have changed from "if" to "when/how". The 2020s have been described as the "quantum decade", and the first production solutions that drive scientific and business value are expected to become available over the next years. Medicine, including fields in healthcare and life sciences, has seen a flurry of quantum-related activities and experiments in the last few years (although medicine and quantum theory have arguably been entangled ever since Schr\"odinger's cat). The initial focus was on biochemical and computational biology problems; recently, however, clinical and medical quantum solutions have drawn increasing interest. The rapid emergence of quantum computing in health and medicine necessitates a mapping of the landscape. In this review, clinical and medical proof-of-concept quantum computing applications are outlined and put into perspective. These consist of over 40 experimental and theoretical studies from the last few years. The use case areas span genomics, clinical research and discovery, diagnostics, and treatments and interventions. Quantum machine learning (QML) in particular has rapidly evolved and shown to be competitive with classical benchmarks in recent medical research. Near-term QML algorithms, for instance, quantum support vector classifiers and quantum neural networks, have been trained with diverse clinical and real-world data sets. This includes studies in generating new molecular entities as drug candidates, diagnosing based on medical image classification, predicting patient persistence, forecasting treatment effectiveness, and tailoring radiotherapy. The use cases and algorithms are summarized and an outlook on medicine in the quantum era, including technical and ethical challenges, is provided

Co-regularized Alignment for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Deep neural networks, trained with large amount of labeled data, can fail to generalize well when tested with examples from a \emph{target domain} whose distribution differs from the training data distribution, referred as the \emph{source domain}. It can be expensive or even infeasible to obtain required amount of labeled data in all possible domains. Unsupervised domain adaptation sets out to address this problem, aiming to learn a good predictive model for the target domain using labeled examples from the source domain but only unlabeled examples from the target domain. Domain alignment approaches this problem by matching the source and target feature distributions, and has been used as a key component in many state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods. However, matching the marginal feature distributions does not guarantee that the corresponding class conditional distributions will be aligned across the two domains. We propose co-regularized domain alignment for unsupervised domain adaptation, which constructs multiple diverse feature spaces and aligns source and target distributions in each of them individually, while encouraging that alignments agree with each other with regard to the class predictions on the unlabeled target examples. The proposed method is generic and can be used to improve any domain adaptation method which uses domain alignment. We instantiate it in the context of a recent state-of-the-art method and observe that it provides significant performance improvements on several domain adaptation benchmarks.Comment: NIPS 2018 accepted versio

Efficient word alignment with Markov Chain Monte Carlo

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