The Bengbu Medical College in Bengbu city in East China's Anhui province and Origin Quantum – a quantum computing company based in the Hefei National High-tech Industry Development Zone, in the provincial capital of Hefei – recently joined forces.

They announced a partnership to explore the application of quantum computing in the medical and health sectors.

It marks the first time that China's medical data has cooperated with domestic independent quantum computing power.

The two parties said they would work together to study the use of quantum computing in various biomedical fields, such as auxiliary medical image recognition, disease diagnosis and drug screening.

The annual medical data volume in China is understood to be nearly 50 trillion gigabytes and the data is growing rapidly, making the application of quantum computing a timely solution to support analysis.

Medical imaging images are understood to be frequently used in clinical disease decision-making. The clinical application of precision medical imaging is said to have higher requirements for image preprocessing, image feature extractions, screening and image interpretability.

An interior view of Origin Quantum's lab in the Hefei National High-tech Industry Development Zone. [Photo/gxq.hefei.gov.cn]

"Quantum computing provides a stronger expression capability of quantum circuits and can play a greater role in image processing," said Dou Menghan, vice president of Origin Quantum.

Dou said the company's self-developed quantum image recognition algorithm could be used to process some of the cancer image data provided by Bengbu Medical College – and effectively reduce the parameter scale and the consumption of computing resources compared with traditional algorithms.