On November 18, the 47th session of the Oujiang Laboratory's “BaiChuan Forum” welcomed Professor Kun Huang from Indiana University. Professor Huang delivered an insightful lecture titled “Computational Pathology and Integrative Genomics for Precision Medicine Research” to the laboratory's faculty and students. This session was chaired by Researcher Jianzhong Su.
During the lecture, Professor Kun Huang provided a detailed introduction to computational pathology, an emerging interdisciplinary field spanning artificial intelligence, computer vision, and biomedical imaging. In recent years, computational pathology has experienced rapid advancement driven by the widespread application of deep learning technologies. Beyond its applications in disease diagnosis and prognosis, computational pathology serves as a powerful phenotypic analysis tool capable of quantitatively measuring cellular and tissue morphology in diseased tissues, such as cancer biopsy samples. Extracted quantitative morphological features can be integrated with omics data to generate novel biological hypotheses about disease progression and new integrated markers for predicting patient clinical outcomes. Professor Huang Kun also reviewed two decades of work in computational pathology and introduced recently developed machine learning methods for integrating multimodal data, which have been applied in biomarker prediction and clinical outcome forecasting across various diseases.
During the Q&A session, Professor Huang engaged in lively discussions with the audience on designing algorithms for deep integration of single-cell transcriptomics, single-cell epigenomics, and other data, as well as the potential upper limits of improvement achievable through such integration.
-Profile of Professor Kun Huang -
Kun Huang Graduated from Tsinghua University in 1996 with dual bachelor's degrees in Biology and Computer Science. Subsequently earned master's degrees in Physiology, Electrical Engineering, and Mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), followed by a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2004. He attained tenure at The Ohio State University in 2010 and served as Associate Dean for Genomic Informatics at The Ohio State University College of Medicine from 2015. In 2017, he joined Indiana University School of Medicine to co-lead the Precision Health Initiative. He currently serves as Chair of the Department of Biostatistics and Health Data Science at Indiana University School of Medicine and Fairbanks School of Public Health, as Distinguished Professor of Genomic Data Science, and as Associate Director of the Indiana University Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center. Elected as a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) in 2018. His primary research areas include bioinformatics, medical image analysis, healthcare big data, machine learning, and their applications in cancer research, Alzheimer's disease, and neuroscience. He has published over 250 research papers.
