I am a Research Fellow at National University of Singapore, under the supervision of PYP Assistant Professor: Tham Yih Chung. I received my Ph.D. from the College of Computer Science, Sichuan University, co-advised by Prof. Xiaojing Shen and Prof. Xuedong Yuan. I was a visiting Ph.D. student at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) in Singapore from September 2022 to September 2023, under the supervision of Principal Scientist: Huazhu Fu. His publications include journals and conferences such as Nature Medicine, The Lancet Digital Health, IEEE TPAMI, IEEE TMI, Medical Image Analysis, IEEE TCYB, IEEE TCSVT, Applied Soft Computing, Signal Processing, ICCV, MICCAI, and FUSION.
- 👯 I’m looking to collaborate on Trustworthy multi-modality learning with uncertainty estimation, Explainable VLM with Grounding, Multi-agents/Agentic System, Foundation model, Benchmarking, and Hallucination and Fairness in VLM.
- 📬 I welcome collaborations with researchers, clinicians, and students. I am also recruiting remote research assistants (RA) and CSC-funded visiting students/PhD applicants interested in multimodal AI and medical foundation models.
- ⚡ Welcome your excellent manuscript! I’m guesting a special issue of Emerging AI Paradigms for Next-Generation Medicine: Safety and Reliability in Vision-Language Models, Agentic Systems, and Digital Twins in the journal of IEEE JBHI (IF = 6.7). [Link] **
📣 News
- [03/2026] Our paper “Uncertainty-Aware Cross-Modal Retrieval for Medical Report Generation” was accepted in IEEE JBHI. Congrats to Nan Zhou!
- [02/2026] Our paper “Understanding pre-training data effects in retinal foundation models using two large fundus cohorts” was onlined in Nature Communications. (link)
- [02/2026] Our paper “Agentic artificial intelligence in eye care: is clinical autonomy finally within reach?” was onlined in The Lancet Digital Health. (link)
- [01/2026] Glad to be the MICCAI2026 Area Chair, Thanks for the MICCAI community!
- [01/2026] Happy New Year!!!🎉🎉🎉
- [12/2025] One agent-based comment paper was accepted by The Lancet Digital Health.
- [10/2025] One paper “Understanding the robustness of vision-language models to medical image artefacts” was accepted by Nature npj Digital Medicine. (link) Congrats to Yukun Zhou!
- [10/2025] Our paper “MedSAM-U: Uncertainty-Guided Auto Multi-Prompt Adaptation for Reliable MedSAM” was accepted by IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology. (link) Congrats to Nan Zhou!
- [08/2025] My paper “Towards Reliable Medical Image Segmentation by Modelling Evidential Calibrated Uncertainty “ was accepted by IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics. (link) Thanks all my Collaborators ! ! !
- [08/2025] One perspective paper “‘Thinking’ LLMs in Medicine: Opportunities, Challenges, and the Road Ahead “ was accepted by The Lancet Digital Health.
- [08/2025] My first key paper “Uncertainty-aware Medical Diagnostic Phrase Identification and Grounding” was accepted by IEEE TPAMI. Codes and camera-ready paper are coming soon. (link) Thanks all my Collaborators ! ! !
- [07/2025] One paper “Ophthalmological Question Answering and Reasoning Using OpenAI o1 vs Other Large Language Models” was accepted by JAMA ophthalmology.
- [06/2025] One correspondence paer accepted by Nature Medicine, Congrats to the Whole Global RETFound team ! ! !
- [06/2025] One paer accepted by ICCV 2025: “GEMeX: A Large-Scale, Groundable, and Explainable Medical VQA Benchmark for Chest X-ray Diagnosis”[Paper][Link], Congrats to Bo ! !
- [06/2025] I am pleased to serve as a Guest Editor for the upcoming Research Topic “Fostering Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence in Medical Imaging” in Frontiers in Medicine (IF = 3.0). [Link]
- [05/2025] One paer accepted by Nature Communications: “Enhancing Diagnostic Accuracy in Rare and Common Fundus Diseases with a Knowledge-Rich Vision-Language Model”[Link], Congrats to Meng, my visiting Ph.D. supervisor H. Fu, and Prof. Cheng! !
- [02/2025] Happy to get the ARVO2025 Travel award, Thanks for the ARVO community!
- [01/2025] Happy New Year! Glad to be the MICCAI2025 AC, Thanks for the MICCAI community. Make it great!
📝 Selected Publications (* means co-first author)
Please find my full paper list at my [Google Scholar].
Explainable and Groundable VLM
FM for Generalists
[Building the world’s first truly global medical foundation model][Paper]
Yih Chung Tham, Jocelyn Hui Lin Goh, …, Ke Zou, Carol Y Cheung, Pearse A Keane
[FusionFM: Fusing Eye-specific Foundational Models for Optimized Ophthalmic Diagnosis][Paper]
Ke Zou*, Jocelyn Hui Lin Goh*, Yukun Zhou*, Tian Lin*, Samantha Min Er Yew, Sahana Srinivasan, Meng Wang, Rui Santos, Gabor M. Somfai, Huazhu Fu, Haoyu Chen, Pearse A. Keane, Ching-Yu Cheng, Yih Chung Tham
MedSAM-U: Uncertainty-Guided Auto Multi-Prompt Adaptation for Reliable MedSAM
Nan Zhou*, Ke Zou*, Kai Ren, Mengting Luo, Linchao He, Meng Wang, Yidi Chen, Yi Zhang, Hu Chen, Huazhu Fu
Agents/Agentic for Specialists
Trustworthy Medical Image Analysis
[Towards Reliable Medical Image Segmentation by utilizing Evidential Calibrated Uncertainty][Conference] [Code][Journal][Code]
Ke Zou, Yidi Chen, Ling Huang, Xuedong Yuan, Xiaojing Shen, Meng Wang, Rick Siow Mong Goh, Yong Liu, Huazhu Fu
Uncertainty-inspired open set learning for retinal anomaly identification
Meng Wang*, Tian Lin*, Lianyu Wang*, Aidi Lin, Ke Zou, et al.
Reliable Multimodality Eye Disease Screening via Mixture of Student’s t Distributions[EyeMoSt+/EyeMoSt Codes]
Ke Zou*, Tian Lin*, Xuedong Yuan, Haoyu Chen, Xiaojing Shen, Meng Wang, Huazhu Fu
Uncertainty-informed Mutual Learning for Joint Medical Image Classification and Segmentation
Kai Ren*, Ke Zou*, Xianjie Liu, Yidi Chen, Xuedong Yuan, Xiaojing Shen, Meng Wang, Huazhu Fu
🗣 Activities
Guest Editors
- IEEE JBHI
- Frontiers in Medicine
Area Chairs
- MICCAI 2025, MICCAI 2026
Reviewers
- Conference Reviewer: FUSION2022, ICASSP2023, ICASSP2024, MIDL2023, MIDL2024, MIDL 2026, MICCAI2023, MICCAI2024, ICIP2023, ICIP2024, BIBM 2025
- Journal Reviewer: IEEE TMI, Medical Image Analysis, IEEE TNNLS, Signal Processing, Pattern Recognition, Knowledge-Based Systems, Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, Biomedical Signal Processing and Control, IEEE TAI, IEEE JBHI
💬 Talks and Presentations
- 2025.10, BEIHAI SUMMIT 2025, Beijing, China.
- 2025.09, MICCAI2025, Daejeon, Republic of Korea.
- 2025.05, ARVO2025, Salt Lake City, US.
- 2024.06, Ph.D. graduation defense sharing, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, invited by Prof. Ping Zhang.
- 2024.04, AIxMed Biweekly Seminar, curated by the MGH/HMS Center for Advanced Medical Computing and Analysis (CAMCA), invited by Prof. Xiang Li.
- 2023.12, Central China Normal University Nanhu Forum academic exchange report, curated by School of Computer Science, Central China Normal University, invited by Prof. Yutao Ma.
- 2023.11, The Third Graduate Academic Forum, curated by Chinese Journal of Graphics and Images.
- 2022.08 MICS2022 of TBraTS: Trusted Brain Tumor Segmentation (3rd Prize)
- 2019.07, FUSION2019, Ottawa, Canada.
🎖 Honors and Awards
- 2025.05 – ARVO2025 Travel Grant Award
- 2024.09 – OMIA MICCAI2024 Best Paper Award
- 2021.12 – Outstanding Graduate Thesis of Chongqing
- 2021.09 – Outstanding Postgraduate of Sichuan University
- 2020.06 – Outstanding Graduate Student of Chongqing
- 2017.06 - Outstanding Undergraduate Student of Chongqing
- 2015.11 – National Scholarship (1%)