KQML-Liver: Interpretable Hybrid Quantum Machine Learning with Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks for Liver Disease Classification

Liver disease remains a major global health concern, highlighting the need for reliable and accessible early detection methods. Although recent advances in machine learning, deep learning and quantum machine learning (QML) have introduced promising diagnostic tools, many approaches suffer from limited interpretability and inflated performance caused by data leakage or overly simplistic evaluation protocols. These constraints reduce their reliability in real-world clinical practice. This paper proposes KQML-Liver, a hybrid framework that integrates QML with Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) to enhance predictive performance and interpretability. The architecture combines parameterized quantum circuits for expressive feature representation with KAN-based functional mappings that capture nonlinear relationships in an interpretable manner. Evaluated on the Indian Liver Patient Dataset (ILPD) under a rigorous preprocessing protocol preventing data leakage, the proposed model achieves 82% classification accuracy and 100% recall, detecting all positive cases, outperforming existing baselines while providing improved transparency in clinical predictions. These results suggest that hybrid KAN-quantum architectures offer a promising direction for interpretable AI-assisted medical diagnosis.