Welcome to Smart Lab!

Smart Lab, led by Prof. Hao Chen, is committed to pushing the boundaries of trustworthy AI technologies for healthcare and science. Our research directions include large-scale models for healthcare, computer-assisted intervention, AI for science, and bioinformatics, etc. Our ultimate goal is to spearhead a transformative revolution in medical practices and scientific discoveries, paving the way for a brighter and healthier future.

Recent News

[ICLR 2026] Exploiting Low-Dimensional Manifold of Features for Few-Shot Whole Slide Image Classification

HKUST Smart Lab, CUHK, and NTU introduce MR Block, a plug-and-play geometry-aware module that exploits the low-dimensional manifold structure of pathology features for few-shot whole slide image classification, accepted at ICLR 2026!

Last updated on 2026/03/18

[Seminar] Publishing in Nature Biomedical Engineering

A seminar by Dr. Jennifer Haskell, Associate Editor at Nature Biomedical Engineering, on how to publish in the journal. In this talk, Dr. Haskell will discuss what the editors look for in submissions, how manuscripts are evaluated, and common reasons for rejection.

Last updated on 2025/12/29

[Nature Communications] A Multimodal Knowledge-Enhanced Whole-Slide Pathology Foundation Model: A New Pathology Pretraining Paradigm

See our latest work on pathology foundation model mSTAR, which leverages multimodal knowledge to enhance these models while achieving whole-slide-level pretraining.

Last updated on 2025/12/11

[Nature Communications] Large-scale generative tumor synthesis in computed tomography images for improving tumor recognition

A new study from HKUST Smart Lab introduces FreeTumor, a Generative AI (GAI) model for tumor synthesis that is now published in Nature Communications.

Last updated on 2025/12/11

[TPAMI] Large-Scale 3D Medical Image Pre-training with Geometric Context Priors

HKUST Smart Lab is proud to announce the publication of our latest work, a foundation model for 3D medical image analysis that is now published in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI).

Last updated on 2025/12/03

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We want you!

We are always looking for self-motivated and determined talents. Open positions are available at our Recruitment page.


Last Update: Mar 18, 2026