Associate Professor Zongyuan Ge conducts interdisciplinary research at the boundary between Medical Artificial Intelligence, Computer-aided Diagnosis, Biomedical Engineering, Digital Health, Medical Imaging and Machine Learning and is a multi-award-winning medical information science and technology entrepreneur. His research leverages cutting-edge AI technologies using large-scale multi-modality medical data including imaging, medical records, gene data and models the clinicians’ medical knowledge underlying tasks like diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment for eye (ophthalmology), skin (dermatology), heart (cardiovascular) and neurodegeneration diseases such as epilepsy and multiple sclerosis. He is also one of Australia’s most in-demand experts in technology, including medical robotics and artificial intelligence, and is a passionate science communicator. He currently holds the tenure position of Associate Professor at the Monash University, the Faculty of IT and the Faculty of Engineering. He also holds NVIDIA AI Fellowship and serves as the Chief Scientist at Monash-Airdoc Research Centre and the Chief Research Officer at Ascertain. He is the Founding Director of the Monash Medical AI group (https://www.monash.edu/mmai-group) with over fully funded 25+ PhD students (internal + external), and 5 Research Fellows.
His research has helped attract more than 25+ million dollars in funding as either primary chief investigator or leading chief investigator from grant bodies, including the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF), The Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), CSIRO, The Australian Research Council (ARC) and industry funding from NVIDIA, The Agilent Thought Leader Program, Molemap/Kahu, Ascertain, Shukun and Airdoc. His h-index is 30, with 5500+ citations only five years post PhD. Zongyuan has strong publication record of 100+ first or senior author top-tier (ERA ranking A*/A) journals and technical conferences in the machine learning and medical AI field. His research papers have been published in top-tier journals and conferences such as The Lancet Digital Health (IF=36.615), The British Medical Journal (IF=96.22), JAMA Neurology (IF=29.91), Nature Nanotechnology (IF=39.21), Brief in Bioinformatics (IF=11.62), Hypertension (IF=10.19), IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (IF=24.31), IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging (TMI) (IF=10.048), Medical Imaging Analysis (IF=13.83) and top-tier conference including NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, KDD, AAAI, IJCAI and MICCAI.
His work has been recognised by many international and national awards, including the 200 Most Qualified Young Researchers in Computer and Mathematics by the Scientific Committee of the Heidelberg Laureate Foundation, IBM Scientific Research Accomplishment Award, IBM Manager Choice Award, NVIDIA AI Fellowship, the Agilent Thought Leader Program, the Australian Pattern Recognition Society (APRS) Early Career Researcher Award in 2021 and Monash Exceptional Achievement Award. The products developed by Airdoc and his team have also won honours such as “the highest award of artificial intelligence in China”–Wu Wenjun Award for Artificial Intelligence Science and Technology twice in 2019, 2022 and “the case of Microsoft global AI cooperation in 2018 World Artificial Intelligence Conference”.
As a lifelong medical technology entrepreneur, he has led and contributed to several international research projects in the areas of dermatology, ophthalmology, radiology, and neurology with major industry companies like IBM Watson Health, medical technology unicorn company Airdoc/Eyetelligence and medical/healthcare services providers such as Molemap Clinic, The Alfred Health, Royal Melbourne Hospital, and Princess Alexandra Hospital. Zongyuan is the Chief Research Officer and launched the company Eyetelligence (https://eyetelligence.ai/au/), which targets the massive global optometry and optical dispensing market. Eyetelligence has received funding of over 25 million dollars from various venture capital, family foundation and the Morrison Government. His company has developed the Eyeteligence workstation, which can screen for the four leading causes of blindness in adults: DR, Cataracts, AMD, and Glaucoma and sold to all 48 Australian BUPA Optical stores and all Specsavers 400 Australia and NZ stores. A/Prof Ge is also the Chief Scientist for the Airdoc Research Centre (https://www.airdoc.com/) to lead the AI technology and product development team. In 2019, he helped build the Monash-Airdoc Research Centre (with 3.5m total investment) to help developed CFDA, NMPA, CLASS III approved healthcare monitoring products. This eye disease diagnosis AI product has served millions of people in China, India, Japan, South Africa and Australia. According to the financial report, the revenue generated from the ophthalmology AI products A/Prof Ge’s team co-developed has generated 25 million dollars in revenue for the company. Airdoc has been successfully listed on Hongkong Stock Exchange (2251-HK) with a market cap of over 1 billion US dollars (2021, Dec).
A/Prof Ge is actively engaged in the scientific community. He coordinates the NVIDIA Student Ambassador Program as the certified NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute (DLI) instructor in Victoria Australia and runs the Monash-NVIDIA joint centre daily activities, and assists NVIDIA in building a strong AI ecosystem in Australia by delivering one-day AI courses, organising deep learning workshops and giving keynotes, plenaries to general science communities. He is on the program/technical committee of several top-tier conferences, such as AAAI and IJCAI, and associate editor/reviewer for journals such as Scientific report, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging and IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. As part of the steering group at the Monash Data Science and AI platform, Zongyuan’s industry expertise developed at IBM and NVIDIA has helped his collaborators to define the prototype of the machine learning algorithm for the healthcare data platform HELIX (https://www.monash.edu/researchinfrastructure/helix/home). His role with Monash eResearch centre and data science & AI platform provides Monash researchers and their collaborators with the ability to access several High-Performance Computing facilities and data science services. This includes the Monash-hosted national specialised data-processing facility for medical imaging and visualisation.