Il progetto

Recent advancements in hybrid classical-quantum information technologies are expected to have a huge impact in our daily life, from health-care and renewable energy to information processing and secure communication. Their major opportunities arise in the very young but rapidly rising field of Quantum Machine Learning (QML), being at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and quantum computing. ThAI-MIA finds itself in this fermenting and exciting research field putting its application focus in Medical Image Analysis (MIA). Driven by a multidisciplinary spirit, our goal is to design and develop new hybrid AI algorithms relying on QML and cutting edge Deep-Learning (DL) methodologies for MIA. During their whole life cycle, from design to use in the actual clinical practice, the AI algorithms will follow an ethics-by-design approach to be validated as trustworthy, i.e. legal, ethical or human-centered, and robust. As the main use case, we will address the challenge of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) early screening in preterm infants directly from images acquired in Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICUs). Quantum, classical and hybrid AI algorithms will be designed, developed and tested to assess infants’ movement and visual preference, as clinical predictors of ASD. ThAI-MIA activities will be based on a more research-based long-term (and high risk) work package on quantum image processing, and a more engineering-oriented one focused on DL for ASD screening in NICUs. The quantum algorithms will be tested on quantum simulators and on real Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) processors. Quantum features, such as superposition principle and entanglement, are expected to play a crucial role in faithfully processing (via quantum parallelism) large images with exponential computational speed-up. Validation, from a quantitative and ethical perspective, will be performed in a NICU in a close partnership with healthcare professionals, and a total number of 20 preterm infants is expected. Through ThAI-MIA we will also lay the scientific foundations of Quantum AI Ethics as a novel sub-field of AI Ethics that is poorly explored to date, but is essential to meet the European Digital Strategy’s priority to develop trustworthy technology. The requested financial resources will be mainly devoted in hiring postdoctoral researchers and in supporting one RTD-A full-time contract extension, apart from the dissemination and open-science activities. To accomplish the project goal, this consortium will bring recognized experts in physics (Unit 1), biomedical engineering (Unit 2) and AI ethics (Unit 3) together. ThAI-MIA will promote quality research that addresses the current open challenges in both technical (QML and MIA), clinical (preterm infants’ with ASD) and ethical (trustworthiness assessment) research fields, hence with a promising scientific, technological, social, medical and economic impact in highly strategic areas for Italy and Europe

I risultati

Le attività di divulgazione