Disease detection
“Imagine you go get a CT scan,” said Mr. Uttley. “There are already AI solutions that you can run that set of images through and ask: ‘Does this look like something that would be cancer?’ ” This existing technology works well on things that are typical and have been identified before, because that’s how machine learning works. If AI has seen something 100,000 times, it can often find something else that looks like it.
But today’s classical computers aren’t equipped to identify something unfamiliar. “Those are places where quantum computers can be much better at thinking of images and being able to say: ‘I can detect rare cancers or rare conditions that you don’t have a huge library of things that look like that,’ ” Mr. Uttley said.
This is also where researchers can use a quantum computer to be able to figure out what things could look like.
“The beauty of quantum computing is that it is a bias formation in quantum physics, this more probabilistic design. And so you can take advantage of that probabilistic design to help them think about this,” Mr. Uttley said.
How far out are we?
Mr. Uttley said we’re in an emergent era of quantum computing. Quantum computers exist and that’s a big deal, but a lot of this technology is still in fairly early stages.
“It’s a little bit like we’re at the beginning of the internet and saying, how are things going to play out,” he explained.
Right now, companies like Quantinuum are striving to perform computations on both a quantum and classic computer, compare the results, and say: “We’re getting the same answer.”
“So, this is the era where we’re able to build trust and say these quantum computers are actually working correctly,” Mr. Uttley explained.
In the future, he said, we can possibly imagine something like a quantum MRI that is able to understand your body in a way that transmits that data to a quantum computer to detect what’s wrong, and be able to tell the difference between cancerous and noncancerous. That will allow faster treatments and tailoring them to specific patient populations.
“What we’re doing today might seem slightly less sexy than that, but is maybe even equally important,” said Mr. Uttley.
This is using quantum computers to make the best encryption keys that can be made. The medical community, which is already using quantum computing to execute this, is excited about this being a better means of keeping patient data as secure as possible.
In June, Quantinuum launched InQuanto, which is quantum computing software that is allowing computational chemists, who, until now, only had classical computers at their fingertips. The move created an opportunity to start thinking about the problems that they worked on and what they would do with a quantum computer. As quantum computers become higher performing over the years, Mr. Uttley said the software will go from tasks like isolating one molecule to solving larger problems.
“That will happen over this next decade, where I think we’ll see the first kind of real use cases come out in the next likely 2 to 3 years,” he said. For now, this technology will likely be used in tandem with classical computers.
Mr. Uttley said that progress in the quantum world and medicine will continue to grow at a slow and steady pace, and in years to come, we’ll likely see things start to click and then eventually take off “full force.”
A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.