The CDS Monthly Research Feature |
The cheap, fast scans that emergency rooms use to check for strokes and brain bleeds may also detect Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias — conditions traditionally diagnosed through expensive MRIs that many elderly patients never receive. A new foundation model trained on 361,663 head CT scans from NYU Langone shows that these widely available scans can identify cognitive impairment with strong accuracy, opening a path to earlier dementia detection in emergency rooms and underserved communities where MRI access remains limited. The model, called FM-HCT and described in the paper “3D Foundation Model for Generalizable Disease Detection in Head Computed Tomography,” published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, was developed by a team including CDS PhD student Haoxu (Howard) Huang and CDS PhD alum Weicheng (Jack) Zhu (who share first authorship), CDS PhD student Long Chen, CDS PhD alum Boyang Yu, CDS MS alum Huanze Tang, and CDS-affiliated Associate Professor Narges Razavian.
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Every copy of a large language model begins each conversation identical to every other copy. They share the same weights and the same character, and none carries a biographical history of its own. CDS Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Data Science Mengye Ren contends in a new paper, “The Self Requires Learning,” that this fact reveals something deeper than a technical limitation: selfhood in any system, biological or artificial, has to be built through a specific kind of ongoing learning that current AI systems do not undergo.
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As language models have gotten better at guessing the next word in a sentence, they have gotten worse at predicting how people actually read. That reversal sits at the center of a new paper by CDS Associate Professor of Linguistics and Data Science Tal Linzen and Byung-Doh Oh, a former CDS Faculty Fellow now an assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University, who argue that today’s strongest models have become too capable to serve as models of the human mind.
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Attention companies, nonprofits, and research labs! CDS invites project proposals for our Data Science MS students to work on during the Fall 2026 semester through our Capstone Project program. Selected from a highly competitive applicant pool, our students excel academically and have cutting-edge machine learning, NLP, and data analysis skills. Proposals are due August 2, 2026.
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