Studied 4th year of Mathematics Pedagogy then changed major, conquered medical AI in the US

At the age of 25, Nguyen Thanh Huy has become one of the prominent young faces of medical artificial intelligence (AI) in Vietnam with many notable international publications.

Nguyen Thanh Huy presents at a seminar at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU, USA) - Photo: NVCC

Currently a researcher at the School of Computer Science , Carnegie Mellon University (CMU, USA) - one of the world's leading schools in AI, Huy is also a research collaborator for Northwestern University - a school ranked top 6 in the US.

It's never too late, the important thing is that you find your passion and be brave to change. I want to research to find more new things that can apply AI in medicine , contributing to supporting doctors in medical examination and treatment.

NGUYEN THANH HUY

Admirable achievements

Currently working primarily remotely, Huy focuses on systems that support medical image analysis and diagnosis, including histopathology, cytology, MRI, and CT. These models require high accuracy in medical image recognition and segmentation. These models can be applied to predict drug response and support physicians in treatment decisions.

Up to now, Thanh Huy has had over 30 scientific works published in conferences and in prestigious international journals such as ISBI, MIDL and many Q1 journals on medicine and computer vision. Huy's Google Scholar is quite impressive with 154 citations and h-index 8 and i10-index 7.

Despite his considerable research experience, Huy only completed his master's degree in medical AI at the University of Bourgogne-Franche-Comté (France) a few months ago. Since early 2024, Huy has founded AIMA Research, an independent research group on AI in medical imaging.

Explaining the formation and operation of the AIMA Research group, Huy said that this is a way to create opportunities for young people who are also studying AI to start participating in research. The group currently has more than 50 members, some of whom have published their first international articles and about a dozen of them have been admitted to master's and doctoral programs abroad.

Decisive change of career

What not many people know is that Huy has changed direction from pedagogy to AI. Nguyen Thanh Huy was admitted to the Mathematics Pedagogy Department of Ho Chi Minh City University of Education in 2018. And he admitted that "the first time was quite difficult" when he first started studying.

He clearly remembers that he "difficulty finding interest and motivation" in purely theoretical math subjects. Huy's average score was below 3.0/4.0. But it wasn't until after his 4th year internship at a public high school in Ho Chi Minh City that Huy "decided" to change his major, thinking that the repetitive nature of teaching was not his passion.

"When I was still wondering about a new direction, luckily a friend invited me to learn about data analysis and data science, which was the springboard for both of us to try another field: AI. I found that AI has both math and applications, and I started taking systematic courses on AI for nine months," Huy said.

That could be said to be a big turning point for Huy. In 2022, he found his first AI internship position at anFPT company. In July of that year, Huy continued to pass VinBigData's AI engineer training program and was accepted into VinBrain.

The moment that opened the path to international research for Huy was in May 2023 when he went to National Cheng Kung University (NCKU, Taiwan). There, Huy worked as a research assistant, participated in a project applying AI to analyze microscope images to monitor the development of cancer cells and had his first international scientific article.

Huy then moved to Taipei Medical University, participating in two projects to build neural graph models on drug molecular structures. The research aimed to predict specificity for lung cancer cells and develop a model to diagnose and classify breast cancer from medical images.

From zero in AI to being highly appreciated by experts

Dr. Dinh Quang Vinh, founder of the Vietnam AI Education Organization, assessed Thanh Huy as one of the most outstanding students of the AI ​​courses so far at this organization. "Coming from a math background, starting almost from zero in programming and AI, but with perseverance, Huy has progressed very quickly and maintained the momentum of development," Mr. Vinh commented.

He said the most impressive thing about Huy is his ability to build a research group and connect with the community, so he trusted him to develop his own group. Huy is also appreciated for his diligence in expanding international connections, actively supporting students in later courses, guiding research, helping many students connect with professors and win foreign scholarships. "I appreciate the spirit of real learning and real research that Huy and his team are maintaining," said Dr. Vinh.

Meanwhile, Associate Professor Dr. Huynh Kim Phat, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University, said that Thanh Huy has a solid academic foundation, coherent research thinking and is very creative. He combines theory (mathematics - statistics, optimization, machine learning) and practice (programming and data management) well. "Huy has the ability to read and synthesize documents quickly, ask the right questions and convert them into testable hypotheses," Dr. Phat commented.

For him, the most impressive point in the collaboration process was the way the group demonstrated three outstanding factors. That is, a very scientific and practical approach to the problem, always starting from a specific problem, then clearly modeling, designing rigorous experiments and evaluating the results with appropriate indicators.

You demonstrate clear critical thinking by not being afraid to "examine" assumptions, proactively conducting controlled experiments to verify the reliability and transferability of the model. Good teamwork spirit, proactively supporting each other, transparent communication, and sticking to progress.

Extending the research journey

Nguyen Thanh Huy plans to apply for PhDs at top universities in the US and return to CMU as a researcher to continue pursuing his chosen research path. He will focus on completing collaborative projects with several hospitals in Ho Chi Minh City with the goal of promoting AI applications in healthcare.

"Of course, I also want to expand the AIMA Research group, build a connection and training platform to help Vietnamese students and trainees gain deeper access to the field of medical AI," Huy shared.

Creative ideas, high applicability

Dr. Minh Le, who is living and working in Texas (USA), expressed that from the perspective of a research colleague, he assessed Thanh Huy as a person with outstanding academic ability, logical thinking and good autonomy in research. You often come up with creative ideas, highly applicable and clearly oriented.

What impressed him most when working with Huy was the harmony between critical thinking, systematic problem-solving approach and professional teamwork spirit.

"I believe Thanh Huy has great potential for development and is fully capable of being accepted into top PhD programs, especially in the fields of AI in medicine and computer science," he said.

WEIGHT

Source: https://tuoitre.vn/hoc-nam-4-su-pham-toan-roi-chuyen-nganh-chinh-phuc-ai-y-te-o-my-20251130090104816.htm