Professor Yu Weimiao from the Singapore Science and Technology Agency (A*STAR) came to the school to give an academic report

On the afternoon of April 10, 2023, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology - Zhongda Hospital Smart Medical Research Institute invited Professor Yu Weimiao from the Singapore Science and Technology Agency (A*STAR) to come to the school to give an academic report. The report was titled “Five Necessary Steps from Traditional Pathology to AI-driven Digital Pathology Diagnosis”. Professor Xu Jun, deputy dean of the School of Artificial Intelligence (School of Future Technology) and executive director of the Smart Medical Research Institute of our school, presided over this report meeting. The meeting adopted a combination of offline + online (Tencent Conference and Kouxiang Academic). There were more than 60 teachers and students participating in the Tencent Conference online and offline, and the Kouxiang Live Broadcast Platform received about 2,000 clicks from the audience.

Dr. Yu Weimiao’s report mainly focused on how to successfully deploy pathological diagnosis based on artificial intelligence in clinical practice. Dr. Yu’s report first reviewed the current development status of the field of pathological diagnosis based on artificial intelligence, and analyzed the difficulties, challenges and bottlenecks currently faced in this field, including technical and non-technical considerations. In response to these bottlenecks and challenges, the five necessary steps required to accelerate the development of AI pathological diagnosis models for clinical application were discussed and summarized, including image quality plan-standard, data calibration plan-standard, training data plan, model training and optimization plan, verification practical and model iteration plan. Dr. Yu introduced in detail the substantial research work his team has done in these five areas, including the development of a number of key solutions missing in the existing ecosystem, such as digital pathology quality management systems, cloud-based structured parallel calibration systems, pathological diagnosis solution optimization and verification solutions, and promoting the establishment of Singapore’s standardized digital pathology calibration database.

During the report period, the academic atmosphere was strong. Teachers and students participating in the offline meeting enthusiastically asked questions. Dr. Yu gave detailed answers to the questions one by one. At the same time, they had extensive and in-depth interactions and exchanges with Dr. Yu on related issues in the fields of pathological image quality control, pathological image standardization construction, etc.

Introduction to Dr. Yu Weimiao:

Dr. Yu Weimiao received his PhD from the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2007, majoring in image processing and machine vision. He joined the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) in Singapore in 2007 and the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology (IMCB) in 2010. He currently leads the Computational Digital Pathology Laboratory (CDPL) of the Bioinformatics Institute (BII) and the Computational Molecular and Pathology Laboratory (CMPL) of IMCB, aiming to deepen and expand research and clinical research. Research and development of beds and industrial partners. His research interests are computational biomedical image analysis and quantitative image informatics in biomedical images. Dr. Yu’s research results have been published in top international peer-reviewed journals, such as Nature Cell Biology, Nature Communications, and Current Biology. His previous research results have been successfully commercialized and have impacted diagnostics and drug discovery. In order to strengthen the application of machine learning and artificial intelligence in clinical diagnosis/prognosis, he established a biotechnology company called A!maginostic Pte. Ltd. in Singapore. He established a world-class tissue-level immune diagnostic platform. The platform allows researchers, clinicians and pharmaceutical companies to analyze patients’ immune signatures for diagnosis, prognosis and drug response studies.

Translated from the original Chinese source.