Bio


Jinxi Xiang (Derek) is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Stanford University School of Medicine, working with Prof. Ruijiang Li to pioneer AI-driven innovations for precision oncology. He earned his Ph.D. in Instrumentation Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2021. Prior to Stanford, Dr. Xiang spent two years as a Senior Researcher at Tencent AI Lab, leading projects in computational pathology, image/video compression, and generative video models for gaming applications.

With expertise bridging computer vision, medical image analysis, and AI, his interdisciplinary approach emphasizes translating technical advances into clinical practice, particularly through computational pathology and multimodal AI. Dr. Xiang’s current work focuses on developing scalable AI tools to optimize cancer diagnosis and treatment, fostering collaborations between engineers, clinicians, and industry partners.

Professional Education


  • Bachelor of Engineering, Wuhan University (2016)
  • Doctor of Philosophy, Tsinghua University (2021)
  • Visiting PhD, University of Edinburgh, UK, Medical Imaging (2020)

Stanford Advisors


Current Research and Scholarly Interests


I develop machine leanring methods to autonomate the digital pathology.

All Publications


  • Deep Learning-Enabled Integration of Histology and Transcriptomics for Tissue Spatial Profile Analysis. Research (Washington, D.C.) Ge, Y., Leng, J., Tang, Z., Wang, K., U, K., Zhang, S. M., Han, S., Zhang, Y., Xiang, J., Yang, S., Liu, X., Song, Y., Wang, X., Li, Y., Zhao, J. 2025; 8: 0568

    Abstract

    Spatially resolved transcriptomics enable comprehensive measurement of gene expression at subcellular resolution while preserving the spatial context of the tissue microenvironment. While deep learning has shown promise in analyzing SCST datasets, most efforts have focused on sequence data and spatial localization, with limited emphasis on leveraging rich histopathological insights from staining images. We introduce GIST, a deep learning-enabled gene expression and histology integration for spatial cellular profiling. GIST employs histopathology foundation models pretrained on millions of histology images to enhance feature extraction and a hybrid graph transformer model to integrate them with transcriptome features. Validated with datasets from human lung, breast, and colorectal cancers, GIST effectively reveals spatial domains and substantially improves the accuracy of segmenting the microenvironment after denoising transcriptomics data. This enhancement enables more accurate gene expression analysis and aids in identifying prognostic marker genes, outperforming state-of-the-art deep learning methods with a total improvement of up to 49.72%. GIST provides a generalizable framework for integrating histology with spatial transcriptome analysis, revealing novel insights into spatial organization and functional dynamics.

    View details for DOI 10.34133/research.0568

    View details for PubMedID 39830364

    View details for PubMedCentralID PMC11739434

  • A vision-language foundation model for precision oncology. Nature Xiang, J., Wang, X., Zhang, X., Xi, Y., Eweje, F., Chen, Y., Li, Y., Bergstrom, C., Gopaulchan, M., Kim, T., Yu, K. H., Willens, S., Olguin, F. M., Nirschl, J. J., Neal, J., Diehn, M., Yang, S., Li, R. 2025

    Abstract

    Clinical decision-making is driven by multimodal data, including clinical notes and pathological characteristics. Artificial intelligence approaches that can effectively integrate multimodal data hold significant promise in advancing clinical care1,2. However, the scarcity of well-annotated multimodal datasets in clinical settings has hindered the development of useful models. In this study, we developed the Multimodal transformer with Unified maSKed modeling (MUSK), a vision-language foundation model designed to leverage large-scale, unlabelled, unpaired image and text data. MUSK was pretrained on 50 million pathology images from 11,577 patients and one billion pathology-related text tokens using unified masked modelling. It was further pretrained on one million pathology image-text pairs to efficiently align the vision and language features. With minimal or no further training, MUSK was tested in a wide range of applications and demonstrated superior performance across 23 patch-level and slide-level benchmarks, including image-to-text and text-to-image retrieval, visual question answering, image classification and molecular biomarker prediction. Furthermore, MUSK showed strong performance in outcome prediction, including melanoma relapse prediction, pan-cancer prognosis prediction and immunotherapy response prediction in lung and gastro-oesophageal cancers. MUSK effectively combined complementary information from pathology images and clinical reports and could potentially improve diagnosis and precision in cancer therapy.

    View details for DOI 10.1038/s41586-024-08378-w

    View details for PubMedID 39779851

    View details for PubMedCentralID 9586871

  • Deep learning-based diagnosis and survival prediction of patients with renal cell carcinoma from primary whole slide images. Pathology Chen, S., Wang, X., Zhang, J., Jiang, L., Gao, F., Xiang, J., Yang, S., Yang, W., Zheng, J., Han, X. 2024

    Abstract

    There is an urgent clinical demand to explore novel diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers for renal cell carcinoma (RCC). We proposed deep learning-based artificial intelligence strategies. The study included 1752 whole slide images from multiple centres. Based on the pixel-level of RCC segmentation, the diagnosis diagnostic model achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.977 (95% CI 0.969-0.984) in the external validation cohort. In addition, our diagnostic model exhibited excellent performance in the differential diagnosis of RCC from renal oncocytoma, which achieved an AUC of 0.951 (0.922-0.972). The graderisk for the recognition of high-grade tumour achieved AUCs of 0.840 (0.805-0.871) in the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) cohort, 0.857 (0.813-0.894) in the Shanghai General Hospital (General) cohort, and 0.894 (0.842-0.933) in the Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium (CPTAC) cohort, for the recognition of high-grade tumour. The OSrisk for predicting 5-year survival status achieved an AUC of 0.784 (0.746-0.819) in the TCGA cohort, which was further verified in the independent general cohort and the CPTAC cohort, with AUCs of 0.774 (0.723-0.820) and 0.702 (0.632-0.765), respectively. Moreover, the competing-risk nomogram (CRN) showed its potential to be a prognostic indicator, with a hazard ratio (HR) of 5.664 (3.893-8.239, p<0.0001), outperforming other traditional clinical prognostic indicators. Kaplan-Meier survival analysis further illustrated that our CRN could significantly distinguish patients with high survival risk. Deep learning-based artificial intelligence could be a useful tool for clinicians to diagnose and predict the prognosis of RCC patients, thus improving the process of individualised treatment.

    View details for DOI 10.1016/j.pathol.2024.05.012

    View details for PubMedID 39168777

  • Towards Real-Time Neural Video Codec for Cross-Platform Application Using Calibration Information Tian, K., Guan, Y., Xiang, J., Zhang, J., Han, X., Yang, W., ACM ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY. 2023: 7961-7970