Quantum machine learning enhanced laser speckle analysis for precise speed prediction

Laser speckle contrast imaging (LSCI) is an optical technique used to assess blood flow perfusion by modeling changes in speckle intensity, but it is generally limited to qualitative analysis due to difficulties in absolute quantification. Three-dimensional convolutional neural networks (3D CNNs) enhance the quantitative performance of LSCI by excelling at extracting spatiotemporal features from speckle data. However, excessive downsampling techniques can lead to significant information loss. To address this, we propose a hybrid quantum–classical 3D CNN framework that leverages variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) to enhance the performance of classical models. The proposed framework employs variational quantum circuits (VQCs) to replace the 3D global pooling layer, enabling the model to utilize the complete 3D information extracted by the convolutional layers for feature integration, thereby enhancing velocity prediction performance. We perform cross-validation on experimental LSCI speckle data and demonstrate the superiority of the hybrid models over their classical counterparts in terms of prediction accuracy and learning stability. Furthermore, we evaluate the models on an unseen test set and observe that the hybrid models outperform the classical models with up to 14.8% improvement in mean squared error (MSE) and up to 26.1% improvement in mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) evaluation metrics. Finally, our qualitative analysis shows that the hybrid models offer substantial improvements over classical models in predicting blood flow at both low and high velocities. These results indicate that the hybrid models possess more powerful learning and generalization capabilities.