Photon or Not: When AI Learns to See in 3D Without Burning Your GPU
CT scans are not photographs. This is a small fact with expensive consequences. A normal image model can pretend that visual understanding is mostly a matter of looking at a flat picture. A CT volume does not offer that courtesy. It is dense, three-dimensional, and full of clinically relevant details that may occupy only a small part of the scan. Feed the whole thing into a multimodal large language model, and the model faces a choice: compress the volume aggressively, sample a few slices, or ask the GPU to become a radiologist with a power bill. ...