About

Hi, I’m Kai Yu, a Postdoctoral Associate in the Division of Computational Health Sciences, Department of Surgery, at the University of Minnesota. My research focuses on multimodal AI for healthcare, spanning medical imaging, biomedical signal analysis, clinical natural language processing, and intelligent systems for clinical decision support.

Work Experience

• Apr. 2025 – Present: Postdoctoral Associate
  Division of Computational Health Sciences, Department of Surgery, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA
  Conducting research on multimodal AI for healthcare, with a focus on medical imaging, clinical NLP, and foundation models for clinical decision support.

• Apr. 2024 – Apr. 2025: Postdoctoral Researcher
  Department of Radiology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA
  Conducted research on AI methods for medical imaging and radiological data analysis, including image understanding, prediction, and clinical applications.

• Sept. 2022 – Mar. 2024: Research Scientist & Innovation Lead
  Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC), A*STAR, Singapore
  Led research and development on multimodal foundation models in ophthalmology and related medical domains, while collaborating with global technology partners to translate research into practical applications.

• Aug. 2020 – Aug. 2022: Research Scientist
  Children’s Hospital Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hangzhou, China
  Developed AI methods for screening and diagnosis of congenital heart disease using heart sound signals, ultrasound images and videos, and 3D CT data.

• Jan. 2016 – Dec. 2019: Co-Founder, AI R&D Lead
  Suzhou BigVision Medical Technology Co., Ltd., Suzhou, China
  Led the development of AI algorithms for OCT and fundus imaging, including denoising, segmentation, classification, and report generation, and worked with partner hospitals on product development and medical device certification.

Education

• Ph.D. in Medical Image Processing and Analysis, Soochow University, Suzhou, China, Sept. 2014 – Jun. 2020
  Advisor: Prof. Xinjian Chen

• B.S. in Electronic Information Engineering, Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, Hangzhou, China, Sept. 2010 – Jun. 2014

Research Funding

• 2023–2026 — Co-PI, National Natural Science Foundation of China (520K CNY)
  Study on visualization analysis and recognition of heart sound characteristics in congenital heart disease

• 2023–2025 — Co-PI, Science Translational & Applied Research (STAR) I Grant (100K SGD)
  Embedding AI in detecting and classifying CT artifacts for initial quality and adequacy assessment

• 2022 — PI, AI3 Horizontal Technology Coordinating Offices Seed Fund 2022 (300K SGD, shortlisted proposal)
  Sparse-shot hierarchical entity graph learning for gigapixel digital pathology images

• 2022–2024 — PI, Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province (100K CNY)
  Key technology for quantitative retinal analysis of high myopia in children and teenagers based on dual-modality medical images

• 2022–2024 — Co-PI, Key Project of the Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province (1M CNY)
  Research and application of new technology for screening and diagnosis of congenital heart disease in newborns under the collaborative environment of edge cloud chain

• 2022–2024 — Co-PI, Key Project of the Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province (100K CNY)
  Establishment and clinical study of a new AI-based ultrasound screening technology for congenital heart disease in newborns

Awards and Honors

• 2023 — Third Prize, Science and Technology Achievement Award, China Birth Defects Intervention Relief Foundation
• 2022 — Third Prize, Science and Technology Progress Award of Zhejiang Province
• 2020 — First Prize, CAAI Wu Wenjun Artificial Intelligence Science and Technology Award
• 2018 — National Scholarship for Doctoral Students
• 2018 — AI Challenger: Fundus Edema Lesion Automatic Segmentation Competition, 3rd place in the biweekly competition and 4th place in the final