Bio


Dr. Hejie Cui is a postdoctoral researcher at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research at Stanford University. Her research focuses on the intersection of machine learning, data mining, and biomedical informatics. At Stanford, Dr. Cui works on large language model (LLM) evaluation and post-training for healthcare. Dr. Cui has authored and co-authored several publications in top computer science and interdisciplinary venues, including NeurIPS, KDD, AAAI, CIKM, TMI, and MICCAI. Her work contributes to advancing the application of artificial intelligence in healthcare and improving the understanding of complex biomedical data. Dr. Cui was selected as a Rising Star in EECS in 2023. She has also received numerous awards, including the Fellowship of 2021 CRA-WP Grad Cohort for Women, Student Travel Grant Award for MICCAI'22, NSF Travel Grant for CIKM'22, and NeurIPS AI4Science Travel Award for NeurIPS'22. Dr. Cui holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Emory University (2024) and a B.Eng. in Computer Science and Engineering from Tongji University (2019). During her graduate studies, she gained industry experience through internships at Microsoft Research and Amazon Science.

Honors & Awards


  • Rising Star in EECS, EECS Rising Stars Committee (11/2023)
  • Laney-EDGE Graduate School Diverse Scholars in the Sciences, Laney Graduate School, Emory University (08/2023)
  • Laney Graduate Student Council Research Grant, Emory University (11/2022)
  • Award for CRA-WP Grad Cohort for Women, Computing Research Association (04/2021)
  • Mitacs Globalink Research Award (GRA), Canada Mitacs (05/2018)

Professional Education


  • PhD, Emory University, Computer Science (2024)
  • BEng, Tongji University, Computer Science and Engineering (2019)

Stanford Advisors


All Publications


  • BrainGB: A Benchmark for Brain Network Analysis With Graph Neural Networks IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MEDICAL IMAGING Cui, H., Dai, W., Zhu, Y., Kan, X., Gu, A., Lukemire, J., Zhan, L., He, L., Guo, Y., Yang, C. 2023; 42 (2): 493-506

    Abstract

    Mapping the connectome of the human brain using structural or functional connectivity has become one of the most pervasive paradigms for neuroimaging analysis. Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) motivated from geometric deep learning have attracted broad interest due to their established power for modeling complex networked data. Despite their superior performance in many fields, there has not yet been a systematic study of how to design effective GNNs for brain network analysis. To bridge this gap, we present BrainGB, a benchmark for brain network analysis with GNNs. BrainGB standardizes the process by (1) summarizing brain network construction pipelines for both functional and structural neuroimaging modalities and (2) modularizing the implementation of GNN designs. We conduct extensive experiments on datasets across cohorts and modalities and recommend a set of general recipes for effective GNN designs on brain networks. To support open and reproducible research on GNN-based brain network analysis, we host the BrainGB website at https://braingb.us with models, tutorials, examples, as well as an out-of-box Python package. We hope that this work will provide useful empirical evidence and offer insights for future research in this novel and promising direction.

    View details for DOI 10.1109/TMI.2022.3218745

    View details for Web of Science ID 000934156000015

    View details for PubMedID 36318557

  • TRANSFORMER-BASED HIERARCHICAL CLUSTERING FOR BRAIN NETWORK ANALYSIS Dai, W., Cui, H., Kan, X., Guo, Y., Van Rooij, S., Yang, C., IEEE IEEE. 2023
  • PTGB: Pre-Train Graph Neural Networks for Brain Network Analysis Yang, Y., Cui, H., Yang, C., Sarker, T., Beam, A., Mortazavi, B. J., Ho, J. C. JMLR-JOURNAL MACHINE LEARNING RESEARCH. 2023: 526-544
  • Joint Embedding of Structural and Functional Brain Networks with Graph Neural Networks for Mental Illness Diagnosis. Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Annual International Conference Zhu, Y., Cui, H., He, L., Sun, L., Yang, C. 2022; 2022: 272-276

    Abstract

    Multimodal brain networks characterize complex connectivities among different brain regions from both structural and functional aspects and provide a new means for mental disease analysis. Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become a de facto model for analyzing graph-structured data. However, how to employ GNNs to extract effective representations from brain networks in multiple modalities remains rarely explored. Moreover, as brain networks provide no initial node features, how to design informative node attributes and leverage edge weights for GNNs to learn is left unsolved. To this end, we develop a novel multiview GNN for multimodal brain networks. In particular, we treat each modality as a view for brain networks and employ contrastive learning for multimodal fusion. Then, we propose a GNN model which takes advantage of the message passing scheme by propagating messages based on degree statistics and brain region connectivities. Extensive experiments on two real-world disease datasets (HIV and Bipolar) demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method over state-of-the-art baselines.

    View details for DOI 10.1109/EMBC48229.2022.9871118

    View details for PubMedID 36085703

  • BRAIN NETWORK TRANSFORMER Kan, X., Dai, W., Cui, H., Zhang, Z., Guo, Y., Yang, C., Koyejo, S., Mohamed, S., Agarwal, A., Belgrave, D., Cho, K., Oh, A. NEURAL INFORMATION PROCESSING SYSTEMS (NIPS). 2022
  • Data-Efficient Brain Connectome Analysis via Multi-Task Meta-Learning Yang, Y., Zhu, Y., Cui, H., Kan, X., He, L., Guo, Y., Yang, C., ACM ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2022: 4743-4751
  • FBNetGen: Task-aware GNN-based fMRI Analysis via Functional Brain Network Generation Kan, X., Cui, H., Lukemire, J., Guo, Y., Yang, C., Konukoglu, E., Menze, B., Venkataraman, A., Baumgartner, C., Dou, Q., Albarqouni, S. JMLR-JOURNAL MACHINE LEARNING RESEARCH. 2022: 618-637

    Abstract

    Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is one of the most common imaging modalities to investigate brain functions. Recent studies in neuroscience stress the great potential of functional brain networks constructed from fMRI data for clinical predictions. Traditional functional brain networks, however, are noisy and unaware of downstream prediction tasks, while also incompatible with the deep graph neural network (GNN) models. In order to fully unleash the power of GNNs in network-based fMRI analysis, we develop FBNETGEN, a task-aware and interpretable fMRI analysis framework via deep brain network generation. In particular, we formulate (1) prominent region of interest (ROI) features extraction, (2) brain networks generation, and (3) clinical predictions with GNNs, in an end-to-end trainable model under the guidance of particular prediction tasks. Along with the process, the key novel component is the graph generator which learns to transform raw time-series features into task-oriented brain networks. Our learnable graphs also provide unique interpretations by highlighting prediction-related brain regions. Comprehensive experiments on two datasets, i.e., the recently released and currently largest publicly available fMRI dataset Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD), and the widely-used fMRI dataset PNC, prove the superior effectiveness and interpretability of FBNETGEN. The implementation is available at https://github.com/Wayfear/FBNETGEN.

    View details for Web of Science ID 001227587200039

    View details for PubMedID 37377881

    View details for PubMedCentralID PMC10296778

  • Zero-Shot Scene Graph Relation Prediction Through Commonsense Knowledge Integration Kan, X., Cui, H., Yang, C., Oliver, N., PerezCruz, F., Kramer, S., Read, J., Lozano, J. A. SPRINGER INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING AG. 2021: 466-482