Yurui GaoView profile
Research Professor
Yurui Gao is a Research Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Vanderbilt University's School of Engineering. His work focuses on small animal and human MRI imaging, particularly diffusion/functional MRI, and medical image processing/analysis. He holds a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University and M.S. and B.A. degrees from Southeast University. Research interests emphasize white matter BOLD signal dynamics, functional connectivity in aging and Alzheimer’s disease, and neuroimaging techniques. Recent work includes studies on white matter tract orientation, vascular geometry, and machine learning approaches for disease classification (e.g., BrainVAE model). Publications highlight advanced methods in spatial smoothing, functional correlation tensors, and connectome analysis. His work addresses Alzheimer’s biomarkers, cognitive decline mechanisms, and the integration of structural/functional brain networks. Affiliated with Vanderbilt’s Biomedical Imaging and Biophotonics group and Surgery/Engineering collaborations. No listed awards or grants, though active in large-scale imaging database preprocessing pipelines (e.g., automatic white matter fMRI analysis).
