A quantum-inspired classifier for clonogenic assay evaluations

Abstract

Recent advances in Quantum Machine Learning (QML) have provided benefits to several computational processes, drastically reducing the time complexity. Another approach of combining quantum information theory with machine learning-without involving quantum computers-is known as Quantum-inspired Machine Learning (QiML), which exploits the expressive power of the quantum language to increase the accuracy of the process (rather than reducing the time complexity). In this work, we propose a large-scale experiment based on the application of a binary classifier inspired by quantum information theory to the biomedical imaging context in clonogenic assay evaluation to identify the most discriminative feature, allowing us to enhance cell colony segmentation. This innovative approach offers a two-fold result: (1) among the extracted and analyzed image features, homogeneity is shown to be a relevant feature in detecting challenging cell colonies; and (2) the proposed quantum-inspired classifier is a novel and outstanding methodology, compared to conventional machine learning classifiers, for the evaluation of clonogenic assays.

Figure 1

Examples of the wells analyzed in this study. Colony images are displayed for each cell line: (a) MDA-MD-231. (b) U87-MG. (c) U251. (d) MCF7. Images are depicted by a reduced 0.25 factor to the original acquisition size.

Figure 2

Conceptualization. The general scheme of the process: (a) conceptual scheme of the proposed multidisciplinary approach involving image processing, machine learning, quantum information theory and cell biology. (b) The pre-processing steps.