PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Huazhu Fu

Also known as Fu Huazhu

Huazhu Fu is an AI researcher whose deep networks segment medical images, from retinal scans to colonoscopy and CT, and whose recent work asks models to report their own uncertainty. After a PhD at Tianjin University in 2013, he held research posts at Nanyang Technological University and at A*STAR's Institute for Infocomm Research, then served as a senior scientist at the Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence in the UAE from 2018 to 2021. His coauthored networks include M-Net for glaucoma screening in 2018, PraNet for polyp segmentation and Inf-Net for COVID-19 lung infections in 2020, and the UIOS retinal model in 2023. Joining A*STAR's Institute of High Performance Computing as a Principal Scientist in 2021, he appeared on A*STAR's Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers lists for 2024 and 2025 and became a Fellow of the IET in 2026. He is a Principal Scientist at A*STAR's Institute of Advanced Intelligence and Computing in Singapore.

Timeline

  1. 2013–2018

    A Tianjin PhD and M-Net

    He earns a PhD at Tianjin University in 2013, then serves as a research fellow at Nanyang Technological University from 2013 to 2015 and as a research scientist at A*STAR's Institute for Infocomm Research from 2015 to 2018. In 2018, he is first author of M-Net, a deep network that segments the optic disc and optic cup together for glaucoma screening and is accepted by IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

  2. 2018–2021

    Inception Institute and PraNet

    He is a senior scientist at the Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence in the UAE from 2018 to 2021. In 2020, he is among the authors of PraNet, a parallel reverse attention network that segments polyps in colonoscopy images, and of Inf-Net, a deep network that segments COVID-19 lung infections in chest CT slices.

  3. 2018–2025

    Organizing eye-disease challenges

    He organizes challenges in eye-disease image analysis, beginning with REFUGE, the Retinal Fundus Glaucoma Challenge, at MICCAI 2018. Other challenges include GAMMA at MICCAI 2021, GOALS at MICCAI 2022, STAGE at MICCAI 2023 and GAVE, on vessels in the eye, at MICCAI 2025.

  4. 2021

    Principal scientist at IHPC

    He joins A*STAR's Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC) in 2021 as a Principal Scientist, with a focus on computer vision, AI in healthcare and trustworthy AI. Since 2020, he is an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

  5. 2023–2025

    UIOS for retinal anomalies

    In October 2023, he jointly supervises a Nature Communications paper that presents UIOS, an uncertainty-inspired open set model trained on fundus images of 9 retinal conditions, which returns an uncertainty score that prompts a manual check on unfamiliar images. In 2025, his team works with ophthalmologists to identify and quantify uncertainty in medical image analysis for diagnosing eye diseases.

  6. 2024–2025

    Clarivate listing and PraNet award

    A*STAR lists him among its Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers in 2024 and again in 2025. In 2025, the MICCAI Young Scientist Publication Impact Award goes to PraNet, a paper he coauthored with Deng-Ping Fan, Ge-Peng Ji, Tao Zhou, Geng Chen, Jianbing Shen and Ling Shao.

  7. 2026

    Fellow of the IET

    He becomes a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) in 2026.

  8. As of October 2026

    Principal scientist at A*STAR IAIC

    As of October 2026, he is a Principal Scientist at A*STAR's Institute of Advanced Intelligence and Computing (IAIC) in Singapore. His research covers medical image analysis, medical vision-language models, medical foundation models, federated learning, uncertainty estimation and visual grounding.

Career

  1. Since 2015Agency for Science, Technology and ResearchResearch Scientist, Principal Scientist
  2. 2018–2021Inception Institute of Artificial IntelligenceSenior Scientist
  3. 2013–2015Nanyang Technological UniversityResearch Fellow

Education

  1. 2013Tianjin UniversityPhD

From the biography.

  1. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes Agency for Science, Technology and Research. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.
  2. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Nanyang Technological University. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  3. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Nanyang Technological University. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.
  4. 5 of the 25 people with the most-cited recent papers also lead on career citationsIncludes Nanyang Technological University. We compare citations to 2023–2025 papers with career citations and h-index, after correcting reviewed publication-date errors: who leads, when they started and where they work.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Huazhu Fu yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Huazhu Fu | Visual Intelligence Lab, College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University vil-website-b.netlify.app. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. [1801.00926] Joint Optic Disc and Cup Segmentation Based on Multi-label Deep Network and Polar Transformation arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. [2006.11392] PraNet: Parallel Reverse Attention Network for Polyp Segmentation arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. [2004.14133] Inf-Net: Automatic COVID-19 Lung Infection Segmentation from CT Images arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Homepage of Huazhu FU hzfu.github.io. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. A*STAR Highly Cited Researchers 2024 a-star.edu.sg. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Uncertainty-inspired open set learning for retinal anomaly identification | Nature Communications nature.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. Building Trustworthy AI Models for Clinical Environments a-star.edu.sg. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. A*STAR Highly Cited Researchers 2025 a-star.edu.sg. Checked 21 October 2026.
  10. Young Scientist Publication Impact Award - MICCAI Society miccai.org. Checked 21 October 2026.