Research at FengGao Lab

AI for the full continuum of colorectal cancer care

We use colorectal cancer as a flagship clinical setting to build explainable, multimodal, and workflow-aware AI. The program connects disease biology, medical imaging, treatment response, and clinical reasoning while keeping every claim tied to the evidence that supports it.

Research map

A disease-first research program

Rather than treating models as isolated outputs, we organize the lab's work around connected capabilities that move from disease biology to clinically grounded prediction and intervention.

Program 01

Explainable Omics & Disease Mechanisms

We use biological knowledge and interpretable learning to identify reproducible disease states, molecular subtypes, and mechanisms that can support patient-level stratification.

Selected studies

Figure 1. Overview of the TMO-Net model (CC BY 4.0)
Genome Biology 2024 Explainable Multi-omics Pretraining

TMO-Net

An explainable pretrained multi-omics model for transferable oncology prediction and pathway-level interpretation.

  • Transferable multi-task learning
  • Pathway-level interpretation
  • Precision oncology workflows

Program 02

Multimodal Foundation Models

We learn transferable representations across radiology, pathology, and molecular data so that clinically useful signals remain available when labels or modalities are limited.

Selected studies

  • CRCME: pathology-guided CT representation learning Ongoing manuscript / public record pending
CRCFound framework overview
Advanced Science 2025 CT Foundation Model

CRCFound

A self-supervised CT foundation model for diagnosis, staging, molecular prediction, and prognosis in colorectal cancer.

  • 5137 unlabeled CT scans
  • 8 downstream tasks
  • Strong transfer under limited labels
Overall Workflow
Advanced Science 2025 Multimodal Prognosis Bridge

Brim

An interpretable bridged multimodal fusion model that links histology and molecular data for pan-cancer prognosis.

  • 12 cancer types
  • Robust to missing modalities
  • Histology-to-genomics bridging

Program 03

Clinical Prediction & Longitudinal Imaging

We design patient-level systems that remain stable across cohorts and platforms, with particular emphasis on treatment response, recurrence, and deployable single-sample prediction.

Selected studies

Figure 1. Clinical workflow and 3D RP-Net study design (CC BY 4.0)
Nature Communications 2021 Longitudinal Response Modeling

3D RP-Net

A longitudinal multi-task MRI model for treatment response prediction in rectal cancer.

  • 2568 MRI scans
  • AUC 0.95 / 0.92
  • Segmentation plus response prediction
The construction of PIANOS
Nature Communications 2025 Transcriptomic Risk Stratification

PIANOS

A normalization-free single-sample classifier for robust colorectal cancer risk stratification across platforms.

  • 24 cohorts / 5439 patients
  • Single-sample and cross-platform
  • Outperformed 105 published models

Program 04

Data-efficient Medical Vision & Computational Surgery

We build efficient visual models for volumetric imaging and operative scenes, reducing annotation burden while preserving anatomical and temporal context.

Selected studies

SegMamba-V2 architecture and tri-orientated spatial Mamba block
IEEE TMI 2025 3D Segmentation Backbone

SegMamba-V2

A general 3D medical image segmentation backbone for long-range volumetric modeling across organs and modalities.

  • CRC-2000 benchmark
  • Tri-orientated spatial Mamba
  • 4 large-scale datasets
SOUSA teacher-student framework with sparse and unlabeled data
Medical Image Analysis 2022 Sparse Annotation Learning

SOUSA

A unified weakly and semi-supervised segmentation framework that learns from sparse labels and unlabeled medical images.

  • Teacher-student consistency
  • Scribble supervision
  • Multi-angle reconstruction loss

Clinical data engine

One disease-focused platform across the full care continuum

More than 50,000 structured CRC records connect routine CT and MR, digitized pathology, selected endoscopy and ultrasound, molecular profiling, treatment, and follow-up. ICGC-ARGO provides the molecular reference layer for a platform that keeps growing through routine clinical care.

10,000+
CRC surgeries expected in 2026
10,000+
patients with digitized pathology
~12,000
pathology slides digitized each month
ICGC-ARGO CRC program overview
Explore ICGC-ARGO CRC

Emerging program

Medical cognitive agents for coordinated clinical reasoning

We are extending validated multimodal capabilities into a modular architecture that can coordinate evidence retrieval, perception, boundary checks, and workflow execution. This is an active research and prototyping program, not a deployed autonomous clinical system.

Decision orchestration

Break down clinical questions and coordinate specialist modules.

Multimodal perception

Connect structured records with imaging, pathology, and omics.

Evidence and safety

Retrieve guidance, grade evidence, and surface uncertainty.

Workflow execution

Support clinicians, researchers, and longitudinal follow-up.

Beyond CRC & open science

Evidence of generalization

Colorectal cancer is our flagship clinical setting, while the underlying methods are tested across cancers, modalities, and real clinical workflows.

Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology / 2026

INTELCAPE

A two-center capsule-endoscopy system for Crohn's disease diagnosis and reader assistance.

Nucleic Acids Research / 2026

PCsRNAdb

An open pan-cancer resource covering 190 datasets and 11,114 small-RNA samples.

Genomics, Proteomics & Bioinformatics / 2025

Biomedical multimodal data fusion

A methods map for multimodal representation, missing data, interpretation, and clinical translation.

Browse all publications