Healthcare organizations have a high volume of sensitive data and traditional technologies have
limited storage capacity and computational resources. The prospect of sharing healthcare data
for machine learning is more arduous due to firm regulations related to patient privacy. The balanced
protection of confidentiality, integrity, and availability of healthcare data, has become a major
concern beyond classical data security considerations. In recent years, federated learning offers a
solution to accelerate distributed machine learning addressing concerns related to data privacy and
governance. Currently, the blend of quantum computing and machine learning has experienced significant
attention from academic institutions and research communities. Quantum computers have
shown the potential to bring huge benefits to the healthcare sector through efficient distributed
training across several quantum nodes. The ultimate objective of this work is to develop a quantum
federated learning framework (QFL) to tackle the optimization, security, and privacy challenges
in the healthcare and clinical industries for medical imaging tasks. In this work, we proposed
federated quantum convolutional neural networks (QCNNs) with distributed training across edge
devices. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed QFL framework, we performed extensive
experiments on medical datasets (Pneumonia MNIST, and CT-kidney disease analysis), which are
non-independently and non-identically partitioned among the healthcare institutions/clients. The
quantum federated global model maintained a high classification testing accuracy and generalizability
and outperformed the locally train clients regardless of how unbalanced the medical data
is distributed among the clients. The global model achieved the best performance as compared to
local clients in terms of the area under curve of the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUCROC)
(0.953) and an average of (0.98) on all classes for predicting outcomes on pneumonia and
CT-kidney datasets, respectively. Moreover, the client selection mechanism is proposed to reduce
the computation overhead at each communication round, which effectively improves the convergence
rate. The proposed quantum federated learning framework is validated and assessed via large-scale
simulations. Based on our results from numerical simulations, the deployment of distributed and
secure quantum machine learning algorithms for enabling scalable and privacy-preserving intelligent
healthcare applications would be extremely valuable.