Ward Melville Student Named A Regeneron Scholar

SETAUKET, NY — Animesh Ghose, an InSTAR student research senior at Ward Melville High School, was named a scholar in the 2021 Regeneron Science Talent Search, arguably the United States's oldest and most prestigious science and math competition for high school seniors, the Three Village Central School District announced.

Animesh titled his project "Prognosis and Diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease Using Graph Convolutional Neural Networks." For it, he analyzed the performance of relatively new kinds of neural network algorithms called Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (GCNN). The GCNN models he made learned to detect the various stages of Alzheimer's disease based on brain data.

The first model analyzed a network of patients to determine the resulting diagnosis. The second model analyzed a graph representation of each patient's brain data to determine the diagnosis. In the end, each of the models showed promising results compared to other machine learning models.

As part of his project, Animesh worked virtually with two computational scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory: Dr. Shinjae Yoo and Dr. Ai Kagawa. He also collaborated with professor Jiook Cha from Seoul National University to acquire data.

As a scholar, Animesh was awarded $2,000 and will continue in the competition for the chance to become one of the 40 student finalists and compete in the final judging to win additional prizes, including the top award of $250,000.