Responsible Quantum Machine Learning for Medical Imaging: A Fairness Audit Across Sensitive Subgroups
arXiv:2610.37819v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum machine learning (QML) is increasingly explored for medical classification, yet its behaviour under subgroup-aware fairness criteria remains understudied. We present an empirical fairness audit of classical and quantum classifiers for medical imaging, assuming QML is not inherently fair. Two scenarios are evaluated: dermatological lesions on DDI (sensitive attribute: Fitzpatrick skin type) and chest X-rays on CheXpert-derived data (sensitive attribute: age group). Using ResNet-18 embeddings, we train SVM, MLP, QSVM and QCNN under a baseline and three mitigation settings: differentiable Equalized Odds (EO) regularisation, Gradient Reversal Learning (GRL), and both combined. Foundation models (PanDerm, EVA-X) serve as external reference