June 14, 2025
Wunderkinds Try Out AI
A summer program at Pitt gave high school students hands on experience with artificial intelligence and its use in medical imaging.
Designs on Aging-Ready
By Strategic Communications
Late in June 2024, a casual conversation about artificial intelligence between a reporter and two recent high school graduates escalated quickly into a technical discussion about the localization and classification of the knee joint.
Less than two minutes in, the reporter recognized he was clearly outclassed by the teenagers and asked them to explain in layperson’s terms.
“We got a taste of the practical application of AI, especially with relation to medical imaging—its real-world significance,”
Aaron Peng, student (not pictured)
They responded that “basically” they had trained an AI model to identify a knee joint within plain knee radiographs for pre- and postsurgery purposes. “We got a taste of the practical application of AI, especially with relation to medical imaging—its real-world significance,” said Aaron Peng, who was headed to the University of Pittsburgh that fall.
Peng and his friend were among 24 high schoolers spending a week at an AI summer school led by Pitt’s Computational Pathology and AI Center of Excellence (CPACE), the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences Pitt HexAI Lab, and the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Computer Society.
In a week’s time, the students went from an introduction to the foundations of artificial intelligence to hands-on coding instruction to training the knee model, which was their culminating project. The program has continued each summer since.
Ahmad P. Tafti, assistant professor of health informatics, School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, says the AI summer school was designed for young people to “enhance their competitiveness for future academic programs and offering insights into potential careers in health care and technology, particularly in AI-powered medical imaging informatics.”