Interrupting your fourth-year medical studies is a bold decision. But that’s what Gabriel Marx did, immersing himself in the world of artificial intelligence (AI) through the Master of Science in Biomedical Data Science (MSBDS) program at the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Mr. Marx is working with Mount Sinai’s Neuropathology Brain Bank and Research CoRE and the Crary Lab on AI-based computer vision algorithms that use digitized brain slides to enhance understanding of neurodegenerative disease and aging. For his master’s thesis, he created a novel model that predicts a person’s age based on a post-mortem slide section of the individual’s hippocampus, an area of the brain important for memory yet vulnerable to the effects of aging and Alzheimer’s disease. John F. Crary, MD, PhD, is Director of the Neuropathology Brain Bank and Research CoRE, and Professor of Pathology, Molecular and Cell-Based Medicine; and Neuroscience.
“I envision myself becoming an ambassador between the clinical side and the engineers and technicians who are on the development side, or even developing tools myself. Either way, my goal is to be on the forefront of harnessing AI for the benefit of dementia patients.”
Mr. Marx then applied this model on a cohort of deceased professional athletes with confirmed chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a neurodegenerative disease caused by repetitive concussions. He found that these athletes’ brains exhibited marked accelerating aging. “These athletes who passed away in their 60’s had brains that looked like they belonged to a 90-year- old,” he says. “This is some of the first quantitative evidence that repeated concussions can cause your brain to age faster.”
In continuing his research, Mr. Marx plans to use this model to discover genes and other environmental factors that either accelerate or protect against the effects of aging in the brain. Mr. Marx is also working with Mount Sinai researchers on a project that uses sophisticated AI models to look at digitized slides and determine the areas of the brain that are most predictive of cognitive impairment. Areas of interest include white matter and the vasculature. “The whole scientific community is still in a place of discovery regarding dementia and neurodegenerative disease,” he says. “Tools like these can form the foundation for effective treatments by advancing our understanding of what is going on in the brain.”
After earning his MSBDS, anticipated in spring 2022, Mr. Marx will return to the medical school where he is pursuing his MD.
Mr. Marx intends to specialize in cognitive impairment and neurological disease and sees AI playing a key role in his efforts to advance therapeutic treatment. “I envision myself becoming an ambassador between the clinical side and the engineers and technicians who are on the development side, or even developing tools myself,” he says. “Either way, my goal is to be on the forefront of harnessing AI for the benefit of dementia patients.”