Investigating Quantum Feature Maps in Quantum Support Vector Machines for Lung Cancer Classification

Background: Classical algorithms often struggle with the high dimensionality of medical data critical for early lung cancer diagnosis. While Quantum Machine Learning (QML) offers enhanced pattern recognition capabilities, the impact of specific quantum feature encoding strategies on diagnostic accuracy remains underexplored.Methods: We evaluated Quantum Support Vector Machines (QSVM) using a dataset of 309 lung cancer patients, divided into six balanced subsets to mitigate class imbalance. Models were implemented on a qasm simulator, comparing three encoding strategies: ZFeatureMap, ZZFeatureMap, and PauliFeatureMap. Performance was assessed using standard classification metrics.Results: The choice of feature map significantly influenced model efficacy. The PauliFeatureMap outperformed other kernels, achieving 100% classification accuracy in three of the six subsets, whereas ZFeatureMap and ZZFeatureMap yielded lower predictive consistency.Conclusion: Quantum feature map selection is a decisive factor in QSVM performance. Specifically, the PauliFeatureMap demonstrates high separability for medical data, highlighting the potential of optimized quantum kernels to improve diagnostic precision.