Nian Wu

Deep Image Analysis and Generation Based on Deformable Shape Changes

Medical Image Analysis | Generative Models | Geometric Deformation

I am a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Virginia (UVA). I work as a Graduate Research Assistant in the MIA Lab under the supervision of Prof. Miaomiao Zhang.

Before attending UVA, I earned my M.S. in Computer Technology from East China Normal University (ECNU), where I worked with Dr. Chaomin Shen as a Research Assistant.

My research focuses on modeling and understanding anatomical structure changes in medical imaging data, including both images and videos, with applications in Alzheimer’s disease analysis and cardiac motion abnormality detection. I develop time-efficient methods, including image registration and atlas construction, to capture and quantify anatomical shape changes, with an emphasis on robustness, well-regularization, and cross-domain generalization.

In addition, I work on diffusion-based generative models for reliable and realistic medical image synthesis, including brain MRI and cross-domain cardiac MRI synthesis, paving the way toward alleviating data scarcity in medical imaging analysis.

I have publications in leading venues including MICCAI, IPMI, ISBI, and MELBA.

Selected Publications

	Learning Geodesics of Geometric Shape Deformations from Images Nian Wu, Miaomiao Zhang MELBA (Journal) Paper | Code
	Unsupervised Cardiac Video Translation Via Motion Feature Guided Diffusion Model Swakshar Deb, Nian Wu, Frederick H. Epstein, Miaomiao Zhang Oral at MICCAI 2025 Paper | Code | YouTube
	IGG: Image Generation Informed by Geodesic Dynamics in Deformation Spaces Nian Wu, Nivetha Jayakumar, Jiarui Xing, Miaomiao Zhang Oral at IPMI 2025 Paper | Code | YouTube
	TLRN: Temporal Latent Residual Networks for Large Deformation Image Registration Nian Wu, Jiarui Xing, Miaomiao Zhang MICCAI 2024 Paper | Code
	LaMoD: Latent Motion Diffusion Model for Myocardial Strain Generation Jiarui Xing, Nivetha Jayakumar, Nian Wu, Yu Wang, Frederick H. Epstein, Miaomiao Zhang ShapeMI 2024 Paper | Code
	Multimodal Learning to Improve Cardiac Late Mechanical Activation Detection from Cine MR Images Jiarui Xing, Nian Wu, Kenneth Bilchick, Frederick H. Epstein, Miaomiao Zhang Oral at ISBI 2024 Paper | YouTube
	NeurEPDiff: Neural Operators to Predict Geodesics in Deformation Spaces Nian Wu, Miaomiao Zhang Oral at IPMI 2023 Paper | Code | YouTube
	Hybrid Atlas Building with Deep Registration Priors Nian Wu, Jian Wang, Miaomiao Zhang, Guixu Zhang, Yaxin Peng, Chaomin Shen ISBI 2022 Paper

Under Review

Geodesic-informed Generative Diffusion Model for Topology-preserved Image Video Generation Nian Wu, Nivetha Jayakumar, Jiarui Xing, Miaomiao Zhang Under Review at MEBAL (Journal)