Vision Intelligence Lab

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

We build foundation models, multimodal agents, and autonomous clinical AI systems for vision science and medicine, with ophthalmology as our core testbed.

I am a Research Assistant Professor at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. I received my PhD from Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center under the supervision of Prof. Mingguang He, and my BS and MS from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Research Direction

Generative AI for Ophthalmology Retinal image, fluorescein angiography, indocyanine green angiography, and multimodal generation. Medical AI Agents Interactive systems for reasoning, diagnosis, VQA, retrieval, doctor-patient-EHR assistance, and clinical decision support. Oculomics and Digital Biomarkers Retinal and choroidal biomarkers for systemic disease prediction, population health, and preventive medicine. Autonomous Clinical Intelligence Human-robot collaboration, embodied AI, and deployable clinical intelligence for future autonomous clinics.

Generative AI: CF2FFA, CF2ICGA, FFA-GPT, EyeGPT, EyeFound, EyeCLIP
AI Agents: Evaluation, VQA, ChatMyopia, EyeAgent
Oculomics and digital biomarkers: retinal vessel biomarkers through the RMHAS series, plus choroidal biomarkers such as ICGA fingerprints
Autonomous clinic

We are Recruiting

I am actively recruiting self-motivated PhD students, research assistants, interns, visiting students, and undergraduate researchers. Strong applicants may come from computer science, biomedical engineering, AI, ophthalmology, optometry, medicine, or related fields.

Academic Excellence

Institutional background: Bachelor's degree from a Top 300 globally ranked university, such as QS, THE, or ARWU rankings.
Academic standing: Minimum cumulative GPA of 3.5/4.0, or equivalent, is strictly required.
Distinctions: Proven academic excellence as a recipient of a National Scholarship or equivalent prestigious honors.

Research Track Record

High-impact publications: Demonstrated ability to produce high-quality research, evidenced by publications in top-tier AI conferences such as CVPR, ICCV, MICCAI, NeurIPS, and ICML, or Q1 JCR journals such as npj Digital Med, IEEE TMI, MedIA, Ophthalmology, JAMA Ophthalmology.
Technical proficiency: Strong expertise in Agentic AI, LLMs, multimodal data fusion, or related biomedical AI domains.

Candidates meeting these elite criteria are encouraged to submit their CV and portfolio for consideration.

Suggested Application Materials

Email subject: Prospective PhD / RA / Intern + your name + Bachelor University Name + area of interest.
Attachments: CV with GPA or ranking information, transcript, and a research proposal describing your background, interests, and why you want to join the lab.
Optional but helpful: Awards, such as National Scholarship, representative paper, thesis, code repository, competition result, or project page.
Funding: For PhD applicants, please also consult the PolyU Graduate School fellowship and scholarship schemes.

News

July 2026 Human-Robot Collaboration for Autonomous Clinic was accepted to MedComm. Congrats to Xinyuan.
May 2026 Three papers were published in npj Digital Medicine: EyeDiff; ConceptVLM; Fundus2videoFM; Congrats to Weiyi, Ruoyu.
Jan 2026 One paper was published in Medical Image Analysis: Predicting DME treatment responses. Congrats to Weiyi.
Nov 2025 Retinomics & Multidisease was published in BMC Medicine. Code. Retinomics & Heart disease was published in Cardiovascular Research.Big congrats to Mayi.
Oct 2025 Effect of intensive blood pressure lowering treatment on retinal microvasculature was published in JACC.
Jul 2025 Awarded a General Research Fund grant from the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong.
Jun 2025 FFA SORA was published in JAMA Ophthalmology. Big congrats to Xinyuan and Lili.
Jun 2025 EyeCLIP, a multimodal vision-language foundation model supporting 11 modalities, was published in npj Digital Medicine. Code.
Jun 2025 Embodied AI in ophthalmology was published in npj Digital Medicine. Big congrats to Yao, Xiaolan, and Xinyuan.
Mar 2025 Evaluating LLMs and agents in healthcare was published in Intelligent Medicine. Big congrats to Xiaolan.

Group Members

Ph.D. Students

Kunhong Xiao (2026.09-)
Xinyu Hou (2026.09-)
Xuze Wang [Kuok Fellowship] (2026.09-)
Ying Zhang (2026.09-)
Zhongyu Chen (2026.09-): Robotics
Bingjie Yan (2025.09-): Agentic AI
Ziyu Gao (2025.09-): Generative AI, World model
Zhenhan Wang (2025.09-): ChatMyopia
Zhuoran Liu (2025.05-): Digital biomarker
Xinyuan Wu (2025.09-): Embodied AI
Bowen Liu (2025.09-): Digital twin
Xiaolan Chen (2024.09-): Agentic AI
Yue Wu [PPPFS] (2024.09-): Generative AI, drug discovery

MPhil Students

Zhibo Wang (2026.01-): Robotics

URIS

Theresa Shukrani Mulindwa, DSAI, 2026-2028

Visiting student

Ke Li, PhD student, 2025-2026

Capstone student, 2025-2026

TONG Anson
SO Kam Chun
KWOK Wing Tung
LAI Kin Ming

Alumni

Weiyi Zhang, PhD student, Best Research Postgraduate Student of PolyU (2025), 2023-2026
Ruoyu Chen, PhD student, 2023-2026
Jie Li, Master student, 2025-2026
Yiqi Ma, Master student, 2025-2026
Qi Zhou, Master student, 2025-2026
Wanrong Yang, Research assistant, 2025-2026
Pusheng Xu, Research assistant, 2024-2025
Lili Wang, Student assistant, 2024-2025
Mayinuer Yusufu, Exchange student, 2024-2025

Service

Teaching

AI in Healthcare (SO1D02, CAR subject for undergraduates) - 2025 - present
Digital Health (SO5001, MSc in Vision Science and Innovation) - 2025 - present

Professional Activities

Conference co-organizer, Asia-Pacific Tele-Ophthalmology Society
Awards Officer, Women in MICCAI
Reviewer for npj Digital Medicine, Nature Computational Science, Nature Communications, Progress in Retinal and Eye Research, British Journal of Ophthalmology, Ophthalmology Science, JMIR, Pattern Recognition Letters, Expert Systems with Applications, Biomedical Signal Processing and Control, and MICCAI

RMHAS: Retina-Based Microvascular Health Assessment System

Demo website: https://www.retinavessel.com/#/

Publications using RMHAS

Shi D, Lin Z, Wang W, Tan Z, Shang X, Zhang X, Meng W, Ge Z, He M. A Deep Learning System for Fully Automated Retinal Vessel Measurement in High Throughput Image Analysis. Front Cardiovasc Med. 2022;9:823436. doi: 10.3389/fcvm.2022.823436
He S, Bulloch G, Zhang L, Meng W, Shi D, He M. Comparing Common Retinal Vessel Caliber Measurement Software with an Automatic Deep Learning System. Curr Eye Res. 2023;48:843-849. doi: 10.1080/02713683.2023.2212881
Fu Y, Yusufu M, Wang Y, He M, Shi D, Wang R. Association of retinal microvascular density and complexity with incident coronary heart disease. Atherosclerosis. 2023;380:117196. doi: 10.1016/j.atherosclerosis.2023.117196
Huang Y, Li C, Shi D, Wang H, Shang X, Wang W, Zhang X, Zhang X, Hu Y, Tang S, et al. Integrating oculomics with genomics reveals imaging biomarkers for preventive and personalized prediction of arterial aneurysms. EPMA J. 2023;14:73-86. doi: 10.1007/s13167-023-00315-7
Zhang W, Tian Z, Song F, Xu P, Shi D, He M. Enhancing stability in cardiovascular disease risk prediction: A deep learning approach leveraging retinal images. Informatics in Medicine Unlocked. 2023;42:101366. doi: 10.1016/j.imu.2023.101366
Shi D, He S, Yang J, Zheng Y, He M. One-shot Retinal Artery and Vein Segmentation via Cross-modality Pretraining. Ophthalmol Sci. 2024;4:100363. doi: 10.1016/j.xops.2023.100363
Yusufu M, Chen Y, Dayimu A, Bulloch G, Jin S, Vingrys AJ, Zhang L, Shang X, Shi D, He M. Retinal Vascular Measurements and Mortality Risk: Evidence From the UK Biobank Study. Transl Vis Sci Technol. 2024;13:2. doi: 10.1167/tvst.13.1.2
Shi D, Zhou Y, He S, Wagner SK, Huang Y, Keane PA, Ting DSW, Zhang L, Zheng Y, He M. Cross-modality Labeling Enables Noninvasive Capillary Quantification as a Sensitive Biomarker for Assessing Cardiovascular Risk. Ophthalmol Sci. 2024;4:100441. doi: 10.1016/j.xops.2023.100441
Jiang Y, Chen Q, Shi D, Miao S, Liu Y, Wang J, Liu L, Chen Y, Wang R. Association of retinal microvascular curve tortuosity and multiple sclerosis: A cross-section analysis from the UK Biobank. Multiple Sclerosis and Related Disorders. 2024;88:105753. doi: 10.1016/j.msard.2024.105753
Huang Y, Plotnikov D, Wang H, Shi D, Li C, Zhang X, Zhang X, Tang S, Shang X, Hu Y, et al. GWAS-by-subtraction reveals an IOP-independent component of primary open angle glaucoma. Nat Commun. 2024;15:8962. doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-53331-0
Chen Q, Miao S, Jiang Y, Shi D, You W, Liu L, Yusufu M, Chen Y, Wang R. Associations of Retinal Microvascular Density and Fractal Dimension with Glaucoma: A Prospective Study from UK Biobank. Ophthalmology Science. 2025;5. doi: 10.1016/j.xops.2024.100661
Yusufu M, Friedman DS, Kang M, Padhye A, Shang X, Zhang L, Shi D, He M. Retinal vascular fingerprints predict incident stroke: findings from the UK Biobank cohort study. Heart. 2025:heartjnl-2024-324705. doi: 10.1136/heartjnl-2024-324705
Li C, Huang Y, Chen J, Hua G, Yang F, Cai D, Kuang Y, He X, Wang Y, Jiang J, et al. Retinal oculomics and risk of incident aortic aneurysm and aortic adverse events: a population-based cohort study. Int J Surg. 2025. doi: 10.1097/js9.0000000000002236
Yusufu M, Vingrys AJ, Shang X, Zhang L, Shi D, Congdon N, He M. Population-based Normative Reference for Retinal Microvascular Atlas. Ophthalmology Science. 2025:100723. doi: 10.1016/j.xops.2025.100723
Zeng X, Chen R, Zhang X, Su T, Wang Y, Hu Y, Shang X, Shi D, Yu H. Associations between a healthy lifestyle score and retinal neurovascular health. British Journal of Ophthalmology. 2025:bjo-2024-326184. doi: 10.1136/bjo-2024-326184
Wu Y, Shen L, Zhao L, Lin X, Xu M, Tu Z, Huang Y, Kong L, Lin Z, Lin D, et al. Noninvasive early prediction of preeclampsia in pregnancy using retinal vascular features. npj Digital Medicine. 2025;8:188. doi: 10.1038/s41746-025-01582-6
Niu Y, Li X, Guo J, Luo S, Shang X, Liu J, Liu S, He M, Shi D, Huang Y, et al. Comprehensive genome-wide analysis of retinal vessel caliber reveals microvascular-blood pressure pathways: advancing predictive, preventive, and personalized medicine. EPMA Journal. 2025. doi: 10.1007/s13167-025-00411-w
Yusufu M, Weinreb RN, Kang M, Vingrys AJ, Shang X, Zhang L, Shi D, He M. Structural and causal links between retinal vascular geometry and neural layer thickness. Microvascular Research. 2025;161:104834. doi: 10.1016/j.mvr.2025.104834
Alatrany AS, Lakhani K, Cowley AC, Yeo JL, Dattani A, Ayton SL, Deshpande A, Graham-Brown MPM, Davies MJ, Khunti K, et al. The retina as a window into detecting subclinical cardiovascular disease in type 2 diabetes. Scientific Reports. 2025;15:27968. doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-13468-4
Wang J, Han S, Mou D, Tang X, Shi D, He M, Guo C, Wang N, Zhang Y. Retinal Vascular Fingerprints as Novel Biomarkers for Primary Angle Closure Disease Progression. Ophthalmology Science. 2025;5. doi: 10.1016/j.xops.2025.100848
Wang B, Shi D, Zhang Z, Zhang L, Sun Y, Liu J, Yan X, Jing J, Li J, Song J, et al. Effect of Intensive Blood Pressure Lowering Treatment on Retinal Microvasculature. JACC. 2025;86:1377-1388. doi: 10.1016/j.jacc.2025.05.020

Contact

Danli Shi
Research Assistant Professor, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Office: GH164
Email: danli.shi@polyu.edu.hk

I am happy to discuss research collaborations, student supervision, invited talks, workshops, and interdisciplinary projects at the interface of AI and healthcare.