PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Le Lu

Also known as Le Lü

Le Lu is a medical imaging researcher whose deep-learning systems look for cancer in CT and X-ray scans. He received a PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 2007, contributed to Siemens' CT colonography and Lung CAD product lines, and worked as a staff scientist at the NIH Clinical Center from 2013 to 2017, where he was the main technical leader for the public ChestXray14 and DeepLesion datasets. After founding Nvidia's medical image analysis group and running PAII's Bethesda research lab until 2021, he was head of Medical AI R&D for Alibaba by 2022, and the PANDA model for finding pancreatic lesions on non-contrast CT came out of DAMO Academy in Nature Medicine in 2023. IEEE elected him a Fellow in 2021, and AIMBE inducted him into its College of Fellows in 2026. He is Senior Director of the Medical AI Lab at Ant Research Institute, Ant Group.

Now at
Ant Research Institute
Badges

Timeline

  1. By 2013

    A Hopkins PhD, then Siemens

    He receives his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 2007. In his first six years at Siemens, he contributes to the company's CT colonography and Lung CAD product lines.

  2. 2013–2018

    Public datasets at the NIH

    From 2013 to 2017, he is a staff scientist in the Radiology and Imaging Sciences department of the NIH Clinical Center, where he is the main technical leader for the public NIH ChestXray14 and DeepLesion dataset releases. In 2017, he coauthors the CVPR paper that introduces ChestX-ray8, a database of 108,948 frontal-view X-ray images of 32,717 patients. In 2018, he coauthors DeepLesion, a dataset of 32,735 lesions in 32,120 CT slices.

  3. 2018–2021

    Medical imaging at Nvidia and PAII

    He founds Nvidia's medical image analysis group and serves as its senior research manager until June 2018. He then becomes Executive Director of PAII Inc.'s Bethesda research lab in Maryland, a post he holds until July 2021.

  4. 2021

    An IEEE Fellowship

    In 2021, IEEE elects him a Fellow for his contribution to machine learning for cancer detection and diagnosis. He also joins the MICCAI society board as chair of its industry workgroup.

  5. 2022–2024

    Cancer screening at DAMO Academy

    By 2022, he is head of Medical AI R&D for Alibaba Group and a researcher at DAMO Academy USA. In 2023, the PANDA model he coauthors at DAMO Academy appears in Nature Medicine, detecting pancreatic lesions on non-contrast CT with 92.9% sensitivity and 99.9% specificity in a validation of 20,530 consecutive patients. In 2024, as head of DAMO Academy's medical AI team, he is behind a screening tool that has performed over six million screenings in China and made progress on early detection of seven common cancers.

  6. 2026

    AIMBE College of Fellows

    In April 2026, AIMBE inducts him into its College of Fellows, Class of 2026, for outstanding contributions to the development of novel techniques, open imaging datasets and clinical products of radiology and oncology.

  7. As of October 2026

    Medical AI at Ant Group

    By April 2026, he is Senior Director of the Medical AI Lab at Ant Research Institute, Ant Group.

Career

  1. NowAnt Research InstituteSenior Director
  2. From 2022AlibabaHead of Medical AI R&D, Head
  3. Until 2018NVIDIAFounder; Senior Research Manager
  4. 2018–2021PAII Inc.Executive Director
  5. 2013–2017National Institutes of HealthStaff Scientist
  6. 2007–2013Siemens

Education

  1. 2007Johns Hopkins UniversityPhD

From the biography.

  1. 11% of AI doctorate holders from 2010 to 2016 founded or led a company or lab by 10 years after graduationIncludes Le Lu. We estimate how often AI doctorate holders founded or led a company or lab by 10 years after graduation, how waiting times compare between founders and top jobs, and which universities trained the most.
  2. Google alumni have founded or led 133 other organizations, more than any other AI labIncludes Alibaba. We estimate that alumni of 17 major AI labs went on to found or lead 350 other organizations, including 226 they founded, and we trace 472 career moves directly between 23 labs since 2010.
  3. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes NVIDIA. 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. 20% of people at companies who shape AI also hold a university role, led by Google and Stanford UniversityIncludes NVIDIA. We estimate that 539 of the 6,766 people with a known current organization (8%) hold both a university role and a company role, including 20% of people at companies and 13% of people at universities.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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

  1. In Search of Effective and Reproducible Clinical Imaging Biomarkers for Population Health and Oncology Applications of Screening, Diagnosis and Prognosis | HKUST CSE cse.hkust.edu.hk. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. ChestX-ray8: Hospital-scale Chest X-ray Database and Benchmarks on Weakly-Supervised Classification and Localization of Common Thorax Diseases arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. DeepLesion: automated mining of large-scale lesion annotations and universal lesion detection with deep learning pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Welcome to Le Lu's Homepage !!! cs.jhu.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Large-scale pancreatic cancer detection via non-contrast CT and deep learning pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. Q&A: How DAMO Academy is Leveraging AI for Good Initiative in Healthcare alibabacloud.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. DAMO Academy’s AI Breakthrough Makes Pancreatic Cancer Easier To Detect csrwire.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. Le Lu, Ph.D. COF-9493 - AIMBE aimbe.org. Checked 21 October 2026.