Advancing Healthcare Using Quantum Computing and Federated Learning: Challenges and Future Perspectives

The increasing availability of electronic health records, medical imaging databases, and sensor-generated clinical datasets has boosted the need for privacy-preserving yet scalable analytical frameworks. In this regard, quantum computing and federated learning are becoming two focal points that may significantly shape future healthcare data processing. Quantum computing provides powerful tools for working with complex, high-dimensional optimization and learning problems, while federated learning facilitates collaborative model training without requiring the centralized exchange of sensitive information about patients. This review explores the integration of these two technologies and Quantum Split Federated Learning (QSFL) as a promising approach for secure and scalable co-operative health care analytics. The treatment then turns to discuss the quantum computation mathematical and algorithmic basics, and subsequently, quantum machine learning methods based on extremes of supervised, unsupervised, and semi-supervised modes. Special emphasis is placed on how QSFL can enable privacy-aware inter-institutional learning and enhance clinical decision support systems. It also surveys the applications for creating high-quality synthetic medical data sets for training, validation and data-sharing using quantum generative adversarial networks (qGANs). In addition to the technological opportunities this paper critically evaluates the practical challenges to real-world implementation, such as hardware limitations, communication costs, regulatory matters, and ethical considerations of a distributed medical learning system-based infrastructure and mechanism. In the end, the survey identifies important open research problems and provides suggestions for future research directions towards realizing quantum-enabled, privacy-preserving healthcare intelligence systems that are anticipated to usher in a new era of medical analytics.