PhD student · Health Technology and Informatics · PolyU

Yingji Fu

I study how the brain relates to broader patterns of health, and develop AI methods that make medical imaging and longitudinal health data more informative.

◈ Google Scholar ◎ ORCID ⌘ GitHub

Yingji FuPhD Student

✉ yingji.fu@connect.polyu.hk

Areas of inquiry

Research interests

A few connected questions guide my work, from human brain health to more efficient imaging models.

01 / Brain & body

Neuroimaging and population health

Studying how body composition relates to brain structure, function, and cognition.

02 / Image synthesis

Making more from MRI

Improving diffusion MRI and synthesizing amyloid PET from structural brain MRI.

03 / Med VLM

Efficient medical vision-language models

Reducing redundant visual tokens in 3D medical vision-language models while preserving clinically useful information.

Selected and recent work

Publications

TGH-DB framework for synthesizing amyloid PET from brain MRI

2026 · MICCAITGH-DB: Template-Guided Heteroscedastic Diffusion Bridge for Brain MRI-to-PET SynthesisH. Pang, Y. Zhu, Y. Fu, C. Ye, A. QiuA 3D diffusion model uses population-level amyloid PET templates and spatially varying noise to synthesize PET images from structural brain MRI.Paper ↗PDF ↗Code ↗

2026 · arXiv preprintMedARC: Training-Free Adaptive Redundancy Compression of Visual Tokens for 3D Medical Vision-Language ModelsY. Zhu, M. Liu, Y. Fu, H. Pang, A. QiuA training-free way to compress redundant visual tokens in 3D medical vision-language models while retaining information needed for clinical tasks.Paper ↗PDF ↗

2025 · Nature Mental HealthRegional adiposity shapes brain and cognition in adultsD. Zhang^†, Y. Fu^†, C. Shen, C. Liu, N. Chen, H. Cao, K. K. Lau, A. Qiu · † Equal contributionIn a large adult cohort, where body fat is stored shows distinct associations with brain measures and cognition, beyond a single body-mass measure.Paper ↗PDF ↗Code ↗

Cycle-conditional diffusion model overview

2025 · Medical Image AnalysisCycle-conditional diffusion model for noise correction of diffusion-weighted images using unpaired dataP. Zhu, C. Liu, Y. Fu, N. Chen, A. QiuCycle-conditional diffusion learns to correct noisy diffusion MRI from unpaired data, reducing the need for matched noisy and clean scans.Paper ↗Open PDF ↗

Online 2025 · IEEE Transactions on Medical ImagingQ-space Guided Multi-Modal Translation Network for Diffusion-Weighted Image SynthesisP. Zhu, Y. Fu, N. Chen, A. QiuQ-MMTN synthesizes densely sampled diffusion MRI from flexible q-space sampling, using structural MRI as complementary information.Paper ↗

2025 · MICCAIQ-space Guided Collaborative Attention Translation Network for Flexible Diffusion-Weighted Images SynthesisP. Zhu, Y. Fu, N. Chen, A. QiuCollaborative attention helps synthesize high-angular-resolution diffusion images from flexible q-space acquisitions and structural MRI inputs.Paper ↗PDF ↗Code ↗

Education

2024 – present

PhD student

Health Technology and Informatics · The Hong Kong Polytechnic University · Hong Kong
Supervised by Professor Anqi Qiu ↗

2023 – 2024

Master of Science candidate

Biomedical Engineering · City University of Hong Kong · Hong Kong

2018 – 2022

Bachelor of Engineering

Biomedical Engineering · Southern Medical University · Guangzhou, China
Undergraduate research supervised by Professor Bing Huang ↗ and Associate Professor Hua Zhang ↗

Recognition

Honors & Awards

2025

First Prize · Segmentation Task

PDCADxFoundation Challenge · MICCAI 2025

PolyUAIM team · Yingji Fu, Pengli Zhu, Anqi Qiu

Certificate ↗Technical report ↗Challenge website ↗

Certificate of achievement for PolyUAIM's first prize in the PDCADxFoundation segmentation task

2022

Outstanding Graduate

Southern Medical University · One of two outstanding graduates in the biomedical engineering cohort

2022

Outstanding Undergraduate Dissertation

Southern Medical University · Deep learning classification of inflammatory bowel disease pathology images

2021

National First Prize · Orchestra

6th National College Student Art Competition · Clarinet section supervisor · Competition ↗