2026
Accelerating 7T Gradient-Echo Brain MRI with Generative AI Denoising
Yixin Wang*, Binxu Li*, Yihao Liang, et al.
Academic Radiology · Accepted
Yixin Wang
I am a Ph.D. candidate in Bioengineering at Stanford University, with a Ph.D. minor in Computer Science. I am fortunate to be co-advised by Kilian M. Pohl and Michael Zeineh.
I hold bachelor's and master's degrees in Computer Science, and during my studies I developed a strong interest in AI for biomedicine. My Ph.D. research develops AI and computational imaging methods to identify interpretable biomarkers of brain disorders. My work spans adolescent brain development, neuropsychiatric disorders, and Alzheimer's disease, linking brain network organization to its biological substrates through multimodal neuroimaging, ultra-high-resolution MRI, and histology. I also develop LLM agents to support medical research and clinical reasoning.
I am honored to have been named a 2027 Siebel Scholar, a $35,000 award recognizing “the world's brightest graduate students and distinguished leaders.” I am also grateful to have received the Society for Neuroscience's 2026 Trainee Professional Development Award, the Postmortem Research in Dementia Workshop's Young Investigator Award, and Stanford Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute's MBCT Fellowship. As a member of the Student Editorial Board of npj Health Systems (Nature Portfolio), I initiated and lead a collection on Digital and AI Approaches for Mental Health Systems. Beyond research, I find particular joy in teaching and helping students gain confidence and discover their own interests. I have mentored more than 10 students, served as Technical Lead for Stanford AIMI's summer programs—helping guide more than 100 high school students—and received the Stanford Bioengineering TA Award.
PhD Candidate, Stanford University
Siebel Scholar, Class of 2027
News
- Honored to be selected as a 2027 Siebel Scholar.
- Our paper, 7TCDM, was accepted for publication in Academic Radiology.
- Received the Trainee Professional Development Award from the Society for Neuroscience.
- Our paper was published in BMJ Digital Health & AI.
- Received the Young Investigator Award and Trainee Travel Award at the Postmortem Research in Dementia Workshop.
- Co-organizing the NeurIPS 2026 Workshop on Generative AI for Health.
- GLANCE was accepted at ACM Multimedia 2026.
- Launched the npj Health Systems collection Digital and AI Approaches for Mental Health Systems as Lead Guest Editor.
- Co-authored “Agents' Last Exam,” a large-scale benchmark for evaluating AI agents on long-horizon professional tasks.
- Received the Audience Choice Award and was named a finalist at the Stanford Wu Tsai Neural Data Science Visualization Competition.
- Our work on brain networks in alcohol use disorder was accepted at Translational Psychiatry.
- Co-organizing the KDD 2026 Workshop on SciSoc Agents & LLMs.
- Two abstracts were accepted at AAIC 2026 and the National Neurotrauma Society Symposium 2026.
- One abstract on BBQ-SLI was accepted as an oral presentation at ISMRM 2026.
- Joined the Student Editorial Board of npj Health Systems.
- Our paper on multi-level patterns predicting cannabis use onset among youth was published in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience.
- Our paper Tabula was accepted at NeurIPS 2025.
- Our paper Mem-GAN was selected for an oral presentation at BioKDD 2025.
- Our BBQ paper on precise MRI-histology coregistration was published in Imaging Neuroscience.
- Received the Stanford Bioengineering Teaching Assistant Award.
- MMedAgent was highlighted in the AI for Healthcare Annual Progress Report at VALSE 2025.
- Appointed Technical Lead for the Stanford AIMI Summer Health AI Programs.
- Received the ISMRM Trainee Award and Magna Cum Laude Merit Award for Volumetric Histology via High-Fidelity Coregistration with MRI.
- Presented one oral presentation and three posters at ISMRM 2025.
- Received the Stanford Bio-X Travel Award.
- Mentored students in the Stanford REU, SIMR, and SSRP summer programs.
- Selected as a Mind, Brain, Computation and Technology Ph.D. Fellow at Stanford Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute.
- MMedAgent was accepted at EMNLP 2024.
- Presented work on Alzheimer's disease biomarkers at AAIC 2024.
- Brain-Cognition Fingerprinting received an oral presentation and Best Paper Award at MLCN 2024.
- Selected as Student Lead for the Stanford AIMI Summer Health AI Bootcamp.
- Passed my Ph.D. qualifying exam.
- SpatialCTD was accepted at the Journal of Computational Biology.
- Our work on universal multimodal cell segmentation was accepted at Nature Methods.
- DANCE, our deep learning library and benchmark for single-cell analysis, was published in Genome Biology.
- Our review of deep learning in single-cell analysis was published in ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology.
- Presented an oral pitch on correlative MRI-histology and received a Student Travel Award at ISMRM 2024.
- Our radiology report generation paper was accepted at Neurocomputing.
- Our ambiguity-selective consistency regularization paper was published in Medical Image Analysis.
- Our brain measurement imputation paper was accepted at PRIME 2023.
- Our medical knowledge graph paper was accepted at the ICML IMLH Workshop 2023.
- Received the Stanford School of Engineering Fellowship.
- Our expert-amateur collaboration paper was accepted at MICCAI 2023.
- SAP-DETR was accepted at CVPR 2023.
- Our survey on deep learning in single-cell analysis became available online.
- Two papers were accepted at MICCAI 2022: registration dataset quality control and source-free fundus image segmentation.
- Worked with Prof. Bo Wang on transformer language models for cross-species cell type mapping.
- Started my Ph.D. at Stanford and moved to California.
- Received the Presidential Scholarship of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
- Named an Outstanding Graduate of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
- Our cross-domain few-shot learning paper was accepted at ICASSP 2022.
- Our cyclic prototype consistency learning paper was accepted at IEEE JBHI.
- Received the National Scholarship.
- Our survey on visual transformers became available online.
- Our uncertainty-aware neurosurgical path-planning paper was accepted at IEEE TMRB.
- Two papers were accepted at MICCAI 2021: ACN and Noisy Labels are Treasure.
- Our transfer-learning paper was accepted at Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine.
- Received the Dean's Award at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
- Our COVID-19 CT benchmark paper was accepted at Medical Physics.
- Won 2nd place in the MICCAI M&Ms Challenge.
- Won 2nd place in the MICCAI BraTS Challenge.
- Our uncertainty-aware semi-supervised learning paper was accepted at MICCAI 2020.
- Our organ detection paper was accepted at ISBI 2020.
- Placed 4th in the MICCAI KiTS Challenge.
Research
My research spans six related themes. Select a theme to see the corresponding papers; some papers appear under more than one theme.
AI for Brain Health: computational methods for understanding brain disorders, cognition, and behavior.
Neurodevelopment & Neurodegeneration: biomarkers of adolescent brain development, neuropsychiatric disorders, and Alzheimer's disease.
Multimodal Learning: learning across neuroimaging, histology, cognition, language, and medical tools.
Generative & Agentic Systems: generative imaging, clinical report generation, and multimodal medical agents.
AI for Biology: machine learning for single-cell data, microscopy, and spatial biology.
Data-Efficient Learning: learning with limited labels, missing modalities, incomplete data, and domain shifts.
14 selected papers · complete list on Google Scholar
2026
Using Deep Learning to Identify Brain Networks Mediating Cognitive and Motor Impairments in Alcohol Use Disorder
Yixin Wang, Eva M. Muller-Oehring, Stephanie A. Sassoon, et al.
Translational Psychiatry · Nature Portfolio
2025
Multi-level Patterns Predict Cannabis Use Onset among Youth
Yixin Wang, Robbie Fraser, Laika Aguinaldo, et al.
Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience
2025
2024
Brain-Cognition Fingerprinting via Graph-GCCA with Contrastive Learning
Yixin Wang, Wei Peng, Yu Zhang, Ehsan Adeli, Qingyu Zhao, Kilian M. Pohl
MLCN at MICCAI · Best Paper Award · Oral
2024
2024
Trust It or Not: Confidence-Guided Automatic Radiology Report Generation
Yixin Wang, Zihao Lin, Zhe Xu, et al.
Neurocomputing
2023
2022
Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning for Rare-Disease Skin Lesion Segmentation
Yixin Wang, Zhe Xu, Jiang Tian, et al.
ICASSP 2022
2021
2020
Double-Uncertainty Weighted Method for Semi-supervised Learning
Yixin Wang, Yao Zhang, Jiang Tian, et al.
MICCAI 2020
2024
The Multi-modality Cell Segmentation Challenge: Towards Universal Solutions
Jun Ma, Ronald Xie, Shamini Ayyadhury, et al., Yixin Wang, et al.
Nature Methods
2025
Tabula: A Tabular Self-Supervised Foundation Model for Single-Cell Transcriptomics
Jiayuan Ding, Jianhui Lin, Shiyu Jiang, Yixin Wang, et al.
NeurIPS 2025
2024
DANCE: A Deep Learning Library and Benchmark for Single-Cell Analysis
Jiayuan Ding, Hongzhi Wen, Wenzhuo Tang, et al., Yixin Wang, et al.
Genome Biology
Selected Talks
- Micron-resolution Fiber Orientations Using 3D-ComSLI to Reveal Hippocampal Micro-connectivity
Oral presentation · ISMRM 2026 - Volumetric Histology via High-Fidelity Coregistration with MRI
Oral presentation · ISMRM 2025 · Magna Cum Laude Merit Award - Mem-GAN: A Pseudo Membrane Generator for Single-cell Imaging in Fluorescent Microscopy
Oral presentation · BioKDD 2025 - Brain-Cognition Fingerprinting via Graph-GCCA with Contrastive Learning
Oral presentation · MLCN at MICCAI 2024 · Best Paper Award - Volumetric MR, Blockface Imaging, and Histology Deliver High-Fidelity Coregistered MRI-Histology
Oral pitch presentation · ISMRM 2024
Honors & Awards
- Siebel Scholar · Siebel Scholars Foundation
- Trainee Professional Development Award · Society for Neuroscience
- Young Investigator Award · Postmortem Research in Dementia Workshop
- Trainee Travel Award · Postmortem Research in Dementia Workshop
- Neural Data Science Visualization Competition Finalist & Audience Choice Award · Stanford
- Bioengineering Teaching Assistant Award · Stanford
- Technical Lead · Stanford AIMI Summer Health AI Programs
- Magna Cum Laude Merit Award · ISMRM
- Trainee Award · ISMRM
- Bio-X Travel Award · Stanford
- Best Paper Award · Machine Learning in Clinical Neuroimaging
- Student Lead · Stanford AIMI Summer Health AI Bootcamp
- Mind, Brain, Computation and Technology Ph.D. Fellowship · Stanford Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute
- Trainee Travel Award · ISMRM
- School of Engineering Fellowship · Stanford
- Presidential Scholarship · Chinese Academy of Sciences
- Outstanding Graduate · Chinese Academy of Sciences
- National Scholarship · Top 1%
- First Class Academic Scholarship · Chinese Academy of Sciences
- Dean's Award · Chinese Academy of Sciences
- 2nd Place · MICCAI BraTS Challenge
- 2nd Place · MICCAI M&Ms Challenge
- 4th Place · MICCAI KiTS Challenge
- Principal's Scholarship · Shandong University
- Top Ten Outstanding Students · Shandong University
- Outstanding Graduate · Shandong Province and Shandong University
- Outstanding Graduate Thesis · Shandong University
- Outstanding Student Cadre · Shandong Province
- National Scholarship · Top 1%
- Jicheng Innovation Scholarship · Shandong University
- International Mathematical Contest in Modeling · Honorable Mention
- Challenge Cup National Academic Science and Technology Competition · First Prize
Teaching
- BIOE 224: Probes and Applications for Multi-modality Molecular Imaging of Living Subjects · Teaching Assistant
- BIOE 131: Ethics in Bioengineering · Teaching Assistant
- BIODS 227: Machine Learning for Neuroimaging · Teaching Assistant
Recipient of the 2024–25 Stanford Bioengineering Teaching Assistant Award.
Mentorship
I am fortunate to work with talented graduate, medical, undergraduate, and pre-college students from a wide range of academic backgrounds. I mentor students in machine learning, neuroimaging, neuroanatomy, experimental design, and scientific communication.
Graduate students
- Rena Zhang · Stanford EE MSLow-dose PET · Generative reconstruction
- Mason Hu · Stanford ICME MSCerebral blood flow MRI · Outcome prediction
- Yuanting Pan · Stanford EE MS → Yale BME PhDMultimodal medical agents · Benchmarking
- Binxu Li · Stanford EE MS → Princeton PhD7T MRI · Generative denoising
Medical student
- Dean Tran · Stanford CS undergraduate → Stanford MD7T MRI · Diffusion models
Undergraduate students
- Ally Jones · Stanford undergraduateMRI-histology coregistration · Blockface imaging
- Jonathan Lee · Princeton undergraduateAlzheimer's biomarkers · fMRI connectivity
- Derek Days · Caltech undergraduate3D tractography · Computational scattered-light imaging
- Victoria Ortega · Stanford SIMR → Emory–Georgia Tech BME PhDFunctional connectivity · Contact sports
- Lee Tao · Stanford undergraduateMRI-histology coregistration · Registration evaluation
- Nhu Nguyen · Stanford SIMR → UCLA undergraduate3D registration · Image annotation
Research programs
- Stanford REUUndergraduate research mentorship
- Stanford SIMRMedical research mentorship
- Stanford AIMI Summer Research InternshipHealth AI research · Technical leadership
- Stanford AIMI Health AI BootcampCurriculum · Project mentorship
- Stanford SSRPSummer research mentorship
- Princeton–Stanford Summer ProgramUndergraduate research mentorship
- Caltech–Stanford Summer ProgramUndergraduate research mentorship
Service
Editorial
- Student Editorial Board Member, npj Health Systems (2026–present)
- Lead Guest Editor, “Digital and AI Approaches for Mental Health Systems”
Workshop & seminar organization
- Co-organizer, NeurIPS 2026 Workshop on GenAI for Health
- Co-organizer, KDD 2026 Workshop on SciSoc Agents & LLMs
- Co-organizer, MICCAI 2025 tutorial on generative models for synthesizing medical images
- Organizer and host, weekly computational neuroscience seminars across Stanford labs
Conference reviewing
NeurIPS, CVPR, ECCV, CIKM, ICLR, BMVC, ICML, and MICCAI.
Journal reviewing
IEEE TPAMI, Medical Image Analysis, Pattern Recognition, EAAI, IEEE TNNLS, ACM TIST, and IEEE TASE.
Education
- Stanford University
Ph.D. in Bioengineering; Ph.D. minor in Computer Science - Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
M.Eng. in Computer Technology
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- Shandong University
B.Eng. in Computer Science
Personal
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