Quantum Machine Learning (QML) offers tremendous potential but is currently limited by the availability of qubits. We introduce an innovative approach that utilizes pre-trained neural networks to enhance Variational Quantum Circuits (VQC). This technique effectively separates approximation error from qubit count and removes the need for restrictive conditions, making QML more viable for real-world applications. Our method significantly improves parameter optimization for VQC while delivering notable gains in representation and generalization capabilities, as evidenced by rigorous theoretical analysis and extensive empirical testing on quantum dot classification tasks. Moreover, our results extend to applications such as human genome analysis, demonstrating the broad applicability of our approach. By addressing the constraints of current quantum hardware, our work paves the way for a new era of advanced QML applications, unlocking the full potential of quantum computing in fields such as machine learning, materials science, medicine, mimetics, and various interdisciplinary areas.

In this work, we propose an AI-based method that intends to improve the conventional retinal disease treatment procedure and help ophthalmologists increase diagnosis efficiency and accuracy. The proposed method is composed of a deep neural networks-based (DNN-based) module, including a retinal disease identifier and clinical description generator, and a DNN visual explanation module. To train and validate the effectiveness of our DNN-based module, we propose a large-scale retinal disease image dataset. Also, as ground truth, we provide a retinal image dataset manually labeled by ophthalmologists to qualitatively show, the proposed AI-based method is effective. With our experimental results, we show that the proposed method is quantitatively and qualitatively effective. Our method is capable of creating meaningful retinal image descriptions and visual explanations that are clinically relevant.

Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD) is an asymptomatic retinal disease which may result in loss of vision. There is limited access to high-quality relevant retinal images and poor understanding of the features defining sub-classes of this disease. Motivated by recent advances in machine learning we specifically explore the potential of generative modeling, using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and style transferring, to facilitate clinical diagnosis and disease understanding by feature extraction. We design an analytic pipeline which first generates synthetic retinal images from clinical images; a subsequent verification step is applied. In the synthesizing step we merge GANs (DCGANs and WGANs architectures) and style transferring for the image generation, whereas the verified step controls the accuracy of the generated images. We find that the generated images contain sufficient pathological details to facilitate ophthalmologists' task of disease classification and in discovery of disease relevant features. In particular, our system predicts the drusen and geographic atrophy sub-classes of AMD. Furthermore, the performance using CFP images for GANs outperforms the classification based on using only the original clinical dataset. Our results are evaluated using existing classifier of retinal diseases and class activated maps, supporting the predictive power of the synthetic images and their utility for feature extraction. Our code examples are available online.