A large scale statistical analysis of quantum and classical neural networks in the medical domain

Classical neural networks (NNs) have shown strong performance in medical data analysis. However, they typically require large labeled datasets and may struggle in data-scarce scenarios, common in clinical practice. Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs) have emerged as a promising alternative. This paper presents a comparative study between NNs and QNNs for heart disease prediction, addressing the limitations of current models in low-data regimes. We systematically evaluate 460 QNNs (using 11-13 qubits) and 4,480 NN architectures, analyzing key design parameters: encoding schemes, re-uploading strategies, circuit depth, and dropout (for QNNs), as well as hidden layers, neurons per layer, and dropout (for classical NNs). Top-performing models are selected for a direct comparison in terms of accuracy and sample complexity. Our results show QNNs achieve comparable accuracy and demonstrate potential advantages in data-scarce settings. Our study presents a structured and reproducible methodology for evaluating QNNs in clinical contexts, thereby supporting the broader investigation of quantum machine learning in applied healthcare domains.