Cheng Li

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My research focuses on developing advanced numerical models and computational tools to enhance our understanding and prediction capabilities for both terrestrial and extraterrestrial climate systems. By leveraging the power of data science, I aim to unravel the complexities of atmospheric dynamics and climate processes on Earth, as well as on other planets such as Mars, Venus, and Jupiter.

My approach involves the integration of large-scale datasets, including satellite observations and ground-based measurements, with statistical methods and sophisticated machine learning algorithms including vision-based large models. This enables me to extract meaningful insights and improve the accuracy of climate models, which are crucial for weather forecasting, climate change projections, and planetary exploration.

Xueding Wang

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My research focuses on novel biomedical imaging and treatment technologies, especially those involving light and ultrasound. I have extensive experience in medical system development, laser-tissue interactions, ultrasound tissue characterization, and adaptation of novel technologies to preclinical and clinical settings. A major part of my research is the development and clinical applications of photoacoustic imaging technology. By working on small-animal models and human patients, I have been seeking for clinical applications of this exciting technology to inflammatory arthritis, cancer, inflammatory bowel disease, eye diseases, osteoporosis, and brain disorders. Besides photoacoustic imaging, I am also interested in development of other medical imaging and treatment technologies, such as ionizing radiation induced acoustic imaging (iRAI) and photo-mediated ultrasound therapy (PUT). As the PI or co-Investigator of several NIH, NSF and DoD-funded research, I have successfully administered the projects, collaborated with other researchers, and produced high-quality publications. My contribution to biomedical optics and ultrasound up to now including over 160 peer-reviewed journal papers is a solid evidence of my creativity and ability to surmount the challenges in this field. I received the Sontag Foundation Fellow of the Arthritis National Research Foundation in 2005, the Distinguished Investigator Award of the Academy of Radiology Research in 2013, and was elected as the fellow of AIMBE in 2020 and the fellow of SPIE in 2022.

What is your most interesting project?

Automated photoacoustic imaging of inflammatory arthritis: Our research has demonstrated the unique capability of photoacoustic imaging (PAI) in diagnosis and treatment monitoring of inflammatory arthritis. The new physiological and molecular biomarkers of synovitis presented by PAI can help in characterizing disease onset, progression, and response to therapy. Based on the endogenous optical contrast, PAI is extremely sensitive to the changes in hemodynamic properties in inflammatory joint tissues (e.g. enhanced flow and hypoxia). We are now conducting a preclinical research on patients affected by rheumatoid arthritis. The initial findings from this patient study are promising and suggest that the new optical contrast and physiological information introduced by PAI could greatly enhance the sensitivity and accuracy of diagnostic imaging and treatment monitoring of arthritis. Aiming at clinical translation, we are currently developing a point-of-care PAI and ultrasound dual-modality imaging system which is fully automated when powered by a robot and AI technologies.

Ionizing radiation acoustic imaging (iRAI) for personalized radiation therapy: iRAI, as a brand-new imaging technology relying on the detection of radiation-induced acoustic waves, allows online monitoring of radiation’s interactions with tissues during radiation therapy, providing real-time, adaptive feedback for cancer treatments. We are developing an iRAI volumetric imaging system that enables mapping of the three-dimensional (3D) radiation dose distribution in a complex clinical radiotherapy treatment. The feasibility of imaging temporal 3D dose accumulation was first validated in studies on phantoms and animal models. Then, real-time visualization of the 3D radiation dose delivered to a patient with liver metastases was accomplished with a clinical linear accelerator. These studies demonstrate the great potential of iRAI to monitor and quantify the 3D radiation dose deposition during treatment, potentially improving radiotherapy treatment efficacy using real-time adaptive treatment.

Describe your research journey.

2005 – 2007 Research Investigator, Department of Radiology, University of Michigan
2007 – 2008 Research Assistant Professor, Department of Radiology, University of Michigan
2008 – 2012 Assistant Professor, Department of Radiology, University of Michigan Medical School
2012 – 2014 Associate Professor, Department of Radiology, University of Michigan
2015 – 2018 Associate Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Michigan
2018 – 2022 Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Michigan
2022 – Now Jonathan Rubin Collegiate Professor of Biomedical Engineering, University of Michigan

What is the most significant scientific contribution you would like to make?

Develop and translate state-of-the-art medical imaging and treatment technologies.

What makes you excited about your data science and AI research?

Date science and AI is super important in developing state-of-the-art medical imaging and treatment technologies, especially for achieving personalized diagnosis and treatment ensuring largely improved patient outcome. As mentioned in the above, the automated imaging system for rheumatology/radiology clinic for arthritis imaging would be strongly powered by AI, which is crucial to achieve our goal of a “smart” ultrasound imaging platform.

Automated dual-modality ultrasound and photoacoustic imaging system

Automated dual-modality ultrasound and photoacoustic imaging system

Michael Sjoding

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Application of machine learning and artificial intelligence in healthcare, particularly in the field of pulmonary and critical care medicine. Deep learning applied to radiologic imaging studies. Physician and artificial intelligence interactions and collaborations. Identifying and addressing algorithmic bias.

Cristian Minoccheri

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Dr. Minoccheri’s research interests focus on using mathematical tools to enhance existing machine learning methods and develop novel ones. A central topic is the use of tensor methods, multilinear algebra, and invariant theory to leverage higher order structural properties in data mining, classification, and deep learning. Other research interests include interpretable machine learning and transparent models. The main applications are in the computational medicine domain, such as phenotyping, medical image segmentation, drug design, patients’ prognosis.

Mark Draelos

Mark Draelos

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My work focuses on image-guided medical robots with an emphasis on clinical translation. My interests include medical robotics, biomedical imaging, data visualization, medical device development, and real-time algorithms.

A major ongoing project is the development of robotic system for automated eye examination. This system relies on machine learning models for tracking and eventually for interpretation of collected data. Other projects concern the live creation of virtual reality scenes from volumetric imaging modalities like optical coherence tomography and efficient acquisition strategies for such purposes.

Qiong Yang

Qiong Yang

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My research program at the University of Michigan (UM) integrates the fields of biophysics, quantitative systems biology, and bottom-up synthetic biology to understand complex stochastic cellular and developmental processes in early embryos.
We have developed innovative computational and experimental techniques in microfluidics and imaging to allow high-throughput quantitative manipulation and single-cell lineage tracking of cellular spatiotemporal dynamical processes in various powerful in vitro and in vivo systems we established in my lab. These systems range from cell-free extracts, synthetic cells reconstituted in microemulsion droplets, presomitic mesoderm (PSM) and progenitor zone (PZ) cells dissociated from the zebrafish tail buds, their re-aggregated 2D and 3D cell-cell communications, ex vivo live tissue explants, and live embryos.
Our current research questions center around the understanding of the design-function relation of robust biological timing, growth, and patterning, how individual molecules and cells communicate to generate collective patterns, and how biochemical, biophysical, and biomechanical signals work together to shape morphogenesis during early embryo development.

Chuan Zhou

Chuan Zhou

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With a passion for developing decision support systems that integrate cutting edge techniques from artificial intelligence, quantitative image analysis, computer vision, and multimodal biomedical data fusion. Research interests have been focusing on characterizing diseases abnormalities and predicting their likelihood of being significant, with the goal to enable early diagnosis and risk stratification, as well as aiding treatment decision making and monitoring.

jjpark

Jeong Joon Park

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3D reconstruction and generative models. I use neural and physical 3D representations to generate realistic 3D objects and scenes. The current focus is large-scale, dynamic, and interactable 3D scene generations. These generative models will be greatly useful for content creators, like games or movies, or for autonomous agent training in virtual environments. For my research, I frequently use and adopt generative modeling techniques such as auto-decoders, GANs, or Diffusion Models.

In my project “DeepSDF,” I suggested a new representation for a 3D generative model that made a breakthrough in the field. The question I answered is: “what should the 3D model be generating? Points, meshes, or voxels?” In DeepSDF paper, I proposed that we should generate a “function,” that takes input as a 3D coordinate and outputs a field value corresponding to that coordinate, where the “function” is represented as a neural network. This neural coordinate-based representation is memory-efficient, differentiable, and expressive, and is at the core of huge progress our community has made for 3D generative modeling and reconstruction.

3D faces with apperance and geometry generated by our AI model

Two contributions I would like to make. First, I would like to enable AI generation of large-scale, dynamic, and interactable 3D world, which will benefit entertainment, autonomous agent training (robotics and self-driving) and various other scientific fields such as 3D medical imaging. Second, I would like to devise a new and more efficient neural network architecture that mimics our brains better. The current AI models are highly inefficient in terms of how they learn from data (requires a huge number of labels), difficult to train continuously and with verbal/visual instructions. I would like to develop a new architecture and learning methods that address these current limitations.

Liyue Shen

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My research interest is in Biomedical AI, which lies in the interdisciplinary areas of machine learning, computer vision, signal and image processing, medical image analysis, biomedical imaging, and data science. I am particularly interested in developing efficient and reliable AI/ML-driven computational methods for biomedical imaging and informatics to tackle real-world biomedicine and healthcare problems, including but not limited to, personalized cancer treatment, and precision medicine.

In the field of AI/ML, we focus on developing reliable, generalizable, data-efficient machine learning and deep learning algorithms by exploiting prior knowledge from the physical world, such as: Prior-integrated learning for data-efficient ML Uncertainty awareness for trustworthy ML. In the field of Biomedicine, we focus on developing efficient computational methods for biomedical imaging and biomedical data analysis to advance precision medicine and personalized treatment, such as: Multi-modal data analysis for decision making Clinical trial translation for real-world deployment.

In the field of AI/ML, we focus on developing reliable, generalizable, data-efficient machine learning and deep learning algorithms by exploiting prior knowledge from the physical world, such as: Prior-integrated learning for data-efficient ML Uncertainty awareness for trustworthy ML. In the field of Biomedicine, we focus on developing efficient computational methods for biomedical imaging and biomedical data analysis to advance precision medicine and personalized treatment, such as: Multi-modal data analysis for decision making Clinical trial translation for real-world deployment.

What are some of your most interesting projects?

Our goal is to develop efficient and reliable AI/ML-driven computational methods for biomedical imaging and informatics to tackle real-world biomedicine and healthcare problems. We hope the technology advancement in AI and ML can help us to better understand human health in different levels. Specifically, we develop Biomedical AI in different parts, including:
– AI in Biomedical Imaging: develop novel machine learning algorithms to advance biomedical imaging techniques for obtaining computational images with improved quality. Specifically, relevant topics include but not limited to: Implicit neural representation learning; Diffusion model / Score-based generative model; Physics-aware / Geometry-informed deep learning.
– AI in Biomedical Image Processing and Bioinformatics: develop robust and efficient machine learning algorithms to extract useful information from multimodal biomedical data for assisting decision making and precision medicine. Specifically, relevant topics include but not limited to: Multimodal representation learning; Robust learning with missing data / noisy labeling; Data-efficient learning such as self- / un- / semi-supervised learning with limited data / labels.

How did you end up where you are today?

I am an assistant professor in the ECE Division of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department of the College of Engineering, University of Michigan – Ann Arbor. Before this, I received my Ph.D. degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University. I obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2016. I is the recipient of Stanford Bio-X Bowes Graduate Student Fellowship (2019-2022), and was selected as the Rising Star in EECS by MIT and the Rising Star in Data Science by The University of Chicago in 2021.

Lise Wei

Lise Wei

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My research focuses on developing machine learning and statistical methods to analyze multi-modality data for patient outcome modeling. These models can be used to personalize cancer patients’ treatment and improve their prognosis. We emphasize on interpretable AI in health care to understand the underlying biological mechanisms that contribute to the specific outcomes for different individuals to provide robust treatment assist for sequential decision making in the practice.