👋 About Me (CV)

I am currently pursuing a Ph.D. at the Department of Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto, under the supervision of Prof. Mark Chiew and Prof. Simon J. Graham, starting in September 2023. I am also affiliated with the Physical Science Platform, Sunnybrook Research Institute. I received my master’s degree in Robotics at the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics, Johns Hopkins University in May 2023, supervised by Prof. Russell H. Taylor and Dr. Manish Sahu. Previously, I obtained bachelor’s degrees in both Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh and Sichuan University since September 2016. Besides that, I was also a research assistant at the JHU Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare working on surgical video analysis with Prof. Swaroop S. Vedula. Additionally, I was a research assistant at the Chinese University of Hong Kong with Prof. Qi Dou, working on soft tissue deformation recovery in robotic surgery. Earlier, I worked on medical image analysis with Dr. Xinan Sun at Tianjin University. My current research interests lie in physics-informed deep learning, medical image analysis, multimodal learning, and world action model for surgical robotics.

🔥 News

2026.09: 🎉🎉 I pass my qualifying exam and now become the PhD candidate!
2026.08: Two papers are accepted by MICCAI CMRx4DFlow Workshop 2026!
2026.05: SelExNet is accepted by MRM 2026!
2026.02: SelExNet and Multi-shot MRSI are accepted by ISMRM 2026, and SelExNet is selected as PowerPitch Oral.
2025.01: One paper abstract is accepted by IGT × ImNO Joint Symposium 2025, selected as Pitch-and-Poster Presentation.
2024.08: SSCDM is accepted by IEEE TMI 2024!
2024.06: AutoSeg4Sinonasal is accepted by Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery 2024!

2024.04: AutoSeg4ETICA is accepted by Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery 2024!
2024.01: I join Simon Graham's Lab as a Ph.D. student, and relocate to Sunnybrook Research Institute.
2023.09: Start my Ph.D. journey at Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto.
2023.05: 🎉🎉 Graduate from JHU — thanks to Prof. Taylor and Dr. Sahu for their supervision.
2023.02: 🎉🎉 Receive admission from Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto. See you in Toronto!
2023.02: Start as a research assistant at CUHK with Prof. Qi Dou.
2022.09: Start as a research assistant at Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare with Dr. Swaroop S. Vedula, working on surgical video analysis.
2022.09: Start as a teaching assistant in 601.455/655 Computer Integrated Surgery (CIS I), instructed by Prof. Russell H. Taylor.
2022.01: Start as a research assistant at LCSR with Prof. Russell H. Taylor, working on image-guided surgery.
2021.08: Enroll in the M.S.E. in Robotics program at JHU.
2021.08: 🎉🎉 Graduate as an honor student from the University of Pittsburgh with B.Sc. degrees in CS and ME.
2021.03: 🎉🎉 Receive admission from Johns Hopkins University. See you in Baltimore!
2020.11: Obtain the Honor Student and Dean's List Award from the Swanson School of Engineering, University of Pittsburgh.
2020.05: Receive the Undergraduate Summer Research Scholarship from the Swanson School of Engineering, University of Pittsburgh.

📝 Publications

* equal contribution # corresponding author

Stage-Aligned Knowledge Distillation for Fast and Memory-Efficient 4D Flow MRI Reconstruction
MICCAI CMRx4DFlow Workshop, 2026
CMRx4DFlow Poster, 2026
Yuliang Xiao^#, Kian Anvari Hamedani, Zach Vavasour, Simon J. Graham, Mark Chiew

[PDF] [Code]

Halves the stage count of an unrolled 4D flow reconstruction network through stage-aligned distillation, cutting runtime and memory at a small cost in fidelity.

Phase-Coupled State-Space Reconstruction for Ultra-Accelerated 4D Flow MRI
MICCAI CMRx4DFlow Workshop, 2026
CMRx4DFlow Poster, 2026
Kian Anvari Hamedani, Fatemeh Ebrahiminia, Yuliang Xiao, Zach Vavasour, Mark Chiew

[PDF]

Reconstructs aggressively undersampled 4D flow MRI with a state-space model that couples the phase differences velocity is derived from, rather than treating each encoding independently.

SelExNet: A Self-Supervised Physics-Informed Framework for Multi-Channel Joint RF and Gradient Waveform Optimization in 2D Spatially Selective Excitation
Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (MRM), 2026
ISMRM PowerPitch Oral, 2026
Yuliang Xiao^#, Jason Rock, Zhe Wu, Jamie Near, Mark Chiew, Simon J. Graham
[PDF] [Code] [Project]

Jointly optimizes multi-channel RF and gradient waveforms in one self-supervised, physics-informed framework, reaching high excitation fidelity without any training database.

Self-Supervised Cyclic Diffeomorphic Mapping for Soft Tissue Deformation Recovery in Robotic Surgery Scenes
IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging (TMI), 2024
Shizhan Gong, Yonghao Long, Kai Chen, Jiaqi Liu, Yuliang Xiao, Alexis Cheng, Zerui Wang, Qi Dou
[PDF] [Code] [Project] | Citations: 9

Recovers soft tissue deformation in surgical scenes through cyclic diffeomorphic mapping, learned without ground-truth correspondences.

A Label-Efficient Framework for Automated Sinonasal CT Segmentation in Image-Guided Surgery
Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery (OHNS), 2024
COSM Oral, 2023
Manish Sahu^*, Yuliang Xiao^*, Jose L. Porras, Ameen Amanian, Aseem Jain, Andrew Thamboo, Russell H. Taylor, Francis X. Creighton, Masaru Ishii
[PDF] [Code] [Project] | Citations: 7

Segments sinonasal structures for image-guided surgery at a fraction of the usual annotation budget.

A Deep Learning Framework for Analysis of the Eustachian Tube and the Internal Carotid Artery
Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery (OHNS), 2024
Ameen Amanian, Aseem Jain, Yuliang Xiao, Chanha Kim, Andy S. Ding, Manish Sahu, Russell H. Taylor, Mathias Unberath, Bryan K. Ward, Deepa Galaiya, Masaru Ishii, Francis X. Creighton
[PDF] [Code] [Project] | Citations: 2

Automated segmentation and morphometric analysis of the Eustachian tube and internal carotid artery from CT.

🎖 Honors and Awards

2026.02, PowerPitch Oral Presentation, ISMRM Annual Meeting 2026, Cape Town.
2025.01, Pitch-and-Poster Presentation, IGT × ImNO Joint Symposium 2025, Toronto.
2023.05, Oral Presentation, Combined Otolaryngology Spring Meetings (COSM) 2023, Boston.
2022.09, Oral Presentation, Conference on Machine Intelligence in Medical Imaging (CMIMI) 2022, Baltimore.
2020.11, Honor Student and Dean’s List Award, Swanson School of Engineering, University of Pittsburgh.
2020.05, Undergraduate Summer Research Scholarship, Swanson School of Engineering, University of Pittsburgh.

📖 Educations

2023.09 - Present, Ph.D. in Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto, Canada.
2021.08 - 2023.05, M.S.E. in Robotics, Johns Hopkins University, USA.
2016.09 - 2021.08, B.Sc. in Computer Science and B.Eng. in Mechanical Engineering, University of Pittsburgh, USA and Sichuan University, China.

💻 Experience

2023.02 - 2023.08, Research Assistant, Chinese University of Hong Kong, with Prof. Qi Dou.
2022.09 - 2023.05, Research Assistant, Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare, JHU, with Prof. Swaroop S. Vedula.
2022.09 - 2022.12, Teaching Assistant, 601.455/655 Computer Integrated Surgery (CIS I), JHU, with Prof. Russell H. Taylor.
2022.01 - 2023.05, Research Assistant, Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics, JHU, with Prof. Russell H. Taylor.

📚 Academic Service

Conference Reviewer: ISMRM, CMIMI.
Journal Reviewer: Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (MRM), Medical Physics, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging (TMI), IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L).

Yuliang Xiao (肖宇亮)