Zikang Xu

Zikang Xu

Specially Appointed Associate Researcher

Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center

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I am a Specially Appointed Associate Researcher (特任副研究员) at the Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center, where I also serve as a postdoctoral researcher jointly supervised by Prof. Wenjie Feng (School of AI and Data Science, USTC) and Prof. Jiahong Gao (IAI, HFCNS).

I received my Ph.D. in 2025 from the School of Biomedical Engineering, USTC, under the supervision of Prof. S. Kevin Zhou. Prior to that, I earned my B.Eng. and M.Eng. from SEU in 2018 and 2021, supervised by Prof. Zhongze Gu.

My research interests lie at the intersection of algorithm fairness in medical image analysis and AI-driven analysis of major neurological disorders.

News

- 2026.05 One paper accepted by MICCAI-26 (Early Accepted). - 2025.11 I am selected to join the first Young Editorial Board of EngMedicine. - 2025.11 One paper accepted by AAAI-26 (Oral). - 2025.10 One paper accepted by IEEE BIBM-25 (Oral). - 2025.07 I start my work as a specially appointed associate researcher and postdoc at IAI, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center. - 2025.05 The moment I've been working toward for years — I just aced my Ph.D. defense! - 2025.04 One paper accepted by npj Digital Medicine. - 2025.03 One paper accepted by MIDL-25 (Oral). - 2025.01 One paper accepted by Medical Image Analysis. - 2024.10 One paper accepted by npj Digital Medicine. - 2024.09 One paper accepted by NeurIPS-24. - 2024.05 One paper accepted by MICCAI-24 (Early Accepted). - 2024.02 One paper accepted by MIDL-24 (Oral). - 2024.02 One paper accepted by MIDL-24. - 2023.05 One paper accepted by MICCAI-23.

Publications

(Selected publications. `*` indicates equal contribution, ✉️ represents the corresponding author.)

Algorithm Fairness

Fair ultrasound diagnosis via adversarial protected attribute aware perturbations on latent embeddings
Zikang Xu, Fenghe Tang, Quan Quan, Qingsong Yao, Qingpeng Kong, Jianrui Ding, Chunping Ning, S. Kevin Zhou✉️
npj Digit. Med. 2025
0 citations · npj Digital Medicine
Code Nature
Addressing Fairness Issues in Deep Learning-Based Medical Image Analysis: A Systematic Review
Zikang Xu, Jun Li, Qingsong Yao, Han Li, Mingyue Zhao, S. Kevin Zhou✉️
npj Digit. Med. 2024
Code Nature
FairMedFM: Fairness Benchmarking for Medical Imaging Foundation Models
Ruinan Jin*, Zikang Xu*, Yuan Zhong*, Qingsong Yao, Qi Dou✉️, S. Kevin Zhou✉️, Xiaoxiao Li✉️
NeurIPS 2024
Code OpenReview
FairAdaBN: Mitigating unfairness with adaptive batch normalization and its application to dermatological disease classification
Zikang Xu, Shang Zhao, Quan Quan, Qingsong Yao, S. Kevin Zhou✉️
MICCAI 2023
Code Springer

MEG Signal Analysis

FAIR-ESI: Feature Adaptive Importance Refinement for Electrophysiological Source Imaging
Linyong Zou*, Liang Zhang*, Xiongfei Wang*, Jia-Hong Gao, Yi Sun, Shurong Sheng, Kuntao Xiao, Wanli Yang, Pengfei Teng, Guoming Luan✉️, Zhao Lv✉️, Zikang Xu✉️
IEEE BIBM 2025 (Oral)
arXiv IEEE

Landmark Detection

SIX-Net: Spatial-Context Information miX-up for Electrode Landmark Detection
Xinyi Wang, Zikang Xu, Heqin Zhu, Qingsong Yao, Yiyong Sun, S. Kevin Zhou✉️
MICCAI 2024 (Early Accepted)
Springer
OFELIA: Optical Flow-based Electrode LocalIzAtion
Xinyi Wang, Zikang Xu, Qingsong Yao, Yiyong Sun, S. Kevin Zhou✉️
MIDL 2024
OpenReview

Medical Image Segmentation

LACOSTE: Exploiting stereo and temporal contexts for surgical instrument segmentation
Qiyuan Wang, Shang Zhao, Zikang Xu, S. Kevin Zhou✉️
Medical Image Analysis 2025
ScienceDirect
Slide-SAM: Medical SAM Meets Sliding Window
Quan Quan*, Fenghe Tang*, Zikang Xu, Heqin Zhu, S. Kevin Zhou✉️
MIDL 2024 (Oral)
Code arXiv

MISC

Medatlas: Evaluating LLMs for Multi-Round, Multi-Task Medical Reasoning Across Diverse Imaging Modalities and Clinical Text
Ronghao Xu, Zhen Huang, Yangbo Wei, Xiaoqian Zhou, Zikang Xu, Ting Liu, Zihang Jiang, S. Kevin Zhou✉️
AAAI 2026
AAAI
Style-Aligned Image Composition for Robust Detection of Abnormal Cells in Cytopathology
Qiuyi Qi*, Xin Li*, Ming Kong, Zikang Xu, Bingdi Chen, Qiang Zhu✉️, S. Kevin Zhou✉️
MIDL 2025 (Oral)
Code OpenReview

Honors and Awards

  • 2025Outstanding Graduate of Anhui Province
  • 2025Outstanding Graduate of the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC)
  • 2021, 2023, 2024Academic First Class Scholarship in USTC
  • 2022Academic Second Class Scholarship in USTC
  • 2021Suzhou Industrial Park Scholarship

Education

Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering

University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) · 2021.09 – 2025.06 · Suzhou, China

M.Eng. in Biological Science and Medical Engineering

Southeast University (SEU) · 2018.09 – 2021.06 · Nanjing, China

B.Eng. in Biological Science and Medical Engineering

Southeast University (SEU) · 2016.09 – 2018.06 · Nanjing, China

Undergraduate, Chien-Shiung Wu College (Honors College)

Southeast University (SEU) · 2014.09 – 2016.06 · Nanjing, China

Teaching

  • TAMedical Image Computing (BMED6208P.01) — USTC, 2023 Fall
  • TAMedical Image Computing (BMED6208P.01) — USTC, 2022 Fall

Professional Services

  • Journal ReviewerIEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging
  • Journal ReviewerACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare
  • Journal ReviewerBiomedical Signal Processing and Control
  • Journal ReviewerFranklin Open
  • Journal ReviewerACM Computing Surveys
  • Conference ReviewerAAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2026)
  • Conference ReviewerMICCAI (2026, 2025, 2024)
  • Conference ReviewerIEEE BIBM (2024)
  • Conference ReviewerIEEE ISBI (2026, 2025)

Invited Talks

  • IEEE UV 2024Benchmarking Fairness in Medical Foundation Models. IEEE International Conference on Universal Village, 2024.10

Internships

Coming soon...