Biomedical Data Analytics News
TIA Spotlight: Kesi Xu
My career journey
I did my Master's in Image and Video Communications and Signal Processing at the University of Bristol. That is where I started getting interested in machine learning for medical imaging - the idea that algorithms could pick up patterns in tissue samples that a pathologist might have otherwise missed made a lot of sense to me, and I was keen to learn more.
I came to the TIA Centre at Warwick for my PhD because of my supervisor, Professor Nasir Rajpoot (both his academic reputation and how seriously he takes mentoring students), and because the Centre has such a strong reputation and network in tissue image analytics. It has been a real privilege to work alongside so many talented people at the frontier of computational pathology. When I started my PhD, my work was mainly on nuclei detection, segmentation, and classification, trying to understand how different large models perform on these core tasks in histopathology.
However, in the summer of 2025, I also did an internship at GSK, where I worked on an information fusion algorithm that brings tissue mask information into a standard cell detection and classification pipeline. Adding that broader tissue-level context gave us clearly better cell classification results. That work ended up at ISBI 2026 - "Tissue Aware Nuclei Detection and Classification Model for Histopathology Images" - and seeing AI research turn into something useful in an industry environment was a really valuable experience.
My current work
My PhD research is about building reliable multimodal AI for computational pathology, which continues to give accurate results across different hospitals, scanners, and patient groups. The ISBI paper was an early step, as it showed that bringing tissue-level context into cell detection can make classification more precise. As I am wrapping up my PhD, though, I want to keep working on AI systems that users can genuinely depend on.
My hobbies and interests
Outside the lab, I enjoy coding - I particularly like building things from scratch, and often use AI tools to quickly develop working prototypes. I also play a lot of tennis, which keeps me active and clears my head.