Lin Tian

Research Fellow
Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital
Email: ltian3@mgh.harvard.edu
[GoogleScholar] [LinkedIn] [GitHub] [CV]

My name is Lin Tian. I am a Research Fellow at LEMoN, Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Harvard Medical School & Massachusetts General Hospital, working with Professor Juan Eugenio Iglesias and Professor Matthew Rosen. I obtained my PhD in Computer Science from UNC Chapel Hill under the supervision of Professor Marc Niethammer. Before attending UNC, I earned my M.S. from the University of Southern California (USC) and my B.S. from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST). During my PhD, I worked as a research scientist intern at ByteDance AI, Alibaba DAMO, and Alphabet X (formerly Google X).

My research focuses on Spatial Intelligence for Healthcare, building precise, generalizable, and trustworthy AI systems that understand, align, and reason about complex 3D spatial alignment across modalities and scales. This vision bridges computer vision, medical imaging, and machine learning to enable robust and interpretable spatial learning across anatomies, modalities, and data domains.

I am particularly interested in the following topics:

The foundations of spatial correspondence and alignment, including transformation regularization [CVPR'23,ECCV'24], similarity measure [MICCAI'23,arXiv'23], foundation model [MICCAI'24,WBIR'24], and uncertainty estimation [arXiv'25].
Physics-grounded simulation for data-efficient spatial learning, including tomosynthesis imaging for alignment between pre-operative and intra-operative images to provide accurate spatial localization during surgery [MICCAI'20, MICCAI'22], and ex vivo dissection photographs for alignment between ex vivo brain slabs and in vivo atlases to enable the localization of neuropathology within in vivo modalities [arXiv'25].

News

[09/2025] » New preprint: "Test-time Uncertainty Estimation for Medical Image Registration via Transformation Equivariance" [arXiv]
[09/2025] » Selected as one of the Rising Stars in EECS 2025, MIT and BU.
[03/2025] » New preprint: "Reference-Free 3D Reconstruction of Brain Dissection Photographs with Machine Learning" [arXiv] [Code]
[02/2025] » CARL has been accepted by CVPR 2025.
[01/2025] » Serve as Area Chair for MICCAI 2025.
[07/2024] » multiGradICON has been accepted by WBIR 2024 for oral presentation.
[07/2024] » NePhi has been accepted by ECCV 2024.
[06/2024] » I will join Harvard Medical School & Massachusetts General Hospital as a Research Fellow.
[06/2024] » uniGradICON has been accepted by MICCAI 2024.
[06/2024] » I successfully defended my PhD.
[03/2024] » New preprint: "uniGradICON: A Foundation Model for Medical Image Registration" [arXiv] [Code]
[11/2023] » New preprint: "SAME++: A Self-supervised Anatomical eMbeddings Enhanced medical image registration framework using stable sampling and regularized transformation" [arXiv] [Code]
[09/2023] » New preprint: "NePhi: Neural Deformation Fields for Approximately Diffeomorphic Medical Image Registration" [arXiv]
[06/2023] » Two papers accepted at MICCAI 2023.
[05/2022] » Research Internship @ Google, working with Alexander Zoellner, Ningrui Li, and Atilla Kiraly.
[02/2023] » One paper accepted at CVPR 2023.
[06/2022] » Received MICCAI Student Travel Award.
[06/2022] » One paper accepted at MICCAI 2022.
[05/2022] » Research Internship @ Alibaba DAMO Academy, working with Dakai Jin and Ke Yan.
[05/2021] » Research Internship @ ByteDance AI Lab, working with Imran Saleemi and Chao Wang.
[02/2021] » One paper accepted at CVPR 2021.
[06/2020] » One paper accepted at MICCAI 2020.
[08/2019] » I joined UNC CS as a PhD student.

Publications

	Test-time Uncertainty Estimation for Medical Image Registration via Transformation Equivariance Lin Tian, Xiaoling Hu, Juan Eugenio Iglesias arXiv [Paper]
	Reference-Free 3D Reconstruction of Brain Dissection Photographs with Machine Learning Lin Tian, Sean I. Young, Jonathan Williams Ramirez, Dina Zemlyanker, Lucas Jacob Deden Binder, Rogeny Herisse, Theresa R. Connors, Derek H. Oakley, Bradley T. Hyman, Oula Puonti, Matthew S. Rosen, Juan Eugenio Iglesias arXiv [Code] [Paper]
	uniGradICON: A Foundation Model for Medical Image Registration Lin Tian, Hastings Greer, Roland Kwitt, Francois-Xavier Vialard, Raúl San José Estépar, Sylvain Bouix, Richard Rushmore, Marc Niethammer MICCAI 2024 [Code] [Paper]
	SAME++: A Self-supervised Anatomical eMbeddings Enhanced medical image registration framework using stable sampling and regularized transformation Lin Tian, Zi Li, Fengze Liu, Xiaoyu Bai, Jia Ge, Le Lu, Marc Niethammer, Xianghua Ye, Ke Yan, Dakai Jin arXiv [Code] [Paper]
	NePhi: Neural Deformation Fields for Approximately Diffeomorphic Medical Image Registration Lin Tian, Hastings Greer, Raúl San José Estépar, Roni Sengupta, Marc Niethammer ECCV 2024 [Paper]
	SAMConvex: Fast discrete optimization for ct registration using self-supervised anatomical embedding and correlation pyramid Zi Li, Lin Tian, Tony CW Mok, Xiaoyu Bai, Puyang Wang, Jia Ge, Jingren Zhou, Le Lu, Xianghua Ye, Ke Yan, Dakai Jin MICCAI 2023 [Code] [Paper]
	GradICON: Approximate Diffeomorphisms via Gradient Inverse Consistency Lin Tian, Hastings Greer, François-Xavier Vialard, Roland Kwitt, Raúl San José Estépar, Richard Jarrett Rushmore, Nikolaos Makris, Sylvain Bouix, Marc Niethammer. CVPR 2023 [Code] [Paper]
	LiftReg: Limited Angle 2D/3D Deformable Registration Lin Tian, Yueh Z. Lee, Raúl San José Estépar, Marc Niethammer. MICCAI 2022 [Code] [Paper]
	Discovering Hidden Physics Behind Transport Dynamics Peirong Liu, Lin Tian, Yubo Zhang, Stephen R. Aylward, Yueh Z. Lee, Marc Niethammer CVPR 2021 [Paper]
	Fluid Registration Between Lung CT and Stationary Chest Tomosynthesis Images Lin Tian, Connor Puett, Peirong Liu, Zhengyang Shen, Stephen R. Aylward, Yueh Z. Lee, Marc Niethammer. MICCAI 2020 [Code] [Paper] [Presentation]

Honors

[2025] Rising Stars in EECS, MIT & BU
[2025] NSF Travel Award, CVPR Doctoral Consortium
[2024] Best Oral Presentation, MICCAI WBIR
[2022] Student Travel Award, MICCAI
[2006] National Scholarship, Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Talks and Presentations

[05/2025] HMBA meeting, Allen Institute
[05/2024] CNS Lab, Stanford University
[04/2024] PICSL, University of Pennsylvania
[02/2024] LCN, Harvard Medical School & Massachusetts General Hospital
[02/2024] QTIM, Harvard Medical School & Massachusetts General Hospital

Services

Area Chair : MICCAI 2025
Conference Reviewer : CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, MICCAI, AAAI
Journal Reviewer: TPAMI, MedIA, TMI, Pattern Recognition

Miscs

My Chinese name is 田琳.
I am also a game developer [AsGameDeveloper]