Portrait
Benjamin Jin
Doctoral Researcher in Medical Image Analysis | MRC DTP in Precision Medicine
University of Edinburgh
About Me

Benjamin Jin is a doctoral researcher within the Medical Research Council's Precision Medicine Doctoral Training Programme at the University of Edinburgh. He holds bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science from the University of Augsburg, Germany. His research focuses on medical image analysis of routine clinical imaging for the prevention of neurovascular disease.

Education
  • University of Edinburgh
    University of Edinburgh
    Institute for Neuroscience and Cardiovascular Research
    Doctoral Researcher
    Sep. 2023 - present
  • University of Augsburg
    University of Augsburg
    M.Sc. in Computer Science
    Oct. 2019 - Aug. 2022
  • University of Augsburg
    University of Augsburg
    B.Sc. in Computer Science
    Oct. 2016 - Oct. 2019
Experience
  • Erasmus MC
    Erasmus MC
    Visiting Researcher
    Jan. 2026 - Feb. 2026
  • Recoro UG
    Recoro UG
    Software Engineer and Data Scientist
    Jan. 2022 - Feb. 2023
  • University of Augsburg
    University of Augsburg
    Research and Teaching Assistant
    Nov. 2020 - Sep. 2021
  • Meteocontrol GmbH
    Meteocontrol GmbH
    Software Developer
    Jan. 2022 - Feb. 2023
  • itestra GmbH
    itestra GmbH
    Software Developer
    Aug. 2017 - Oct. 2017
Honors & Awards
  • SINAPSE ECR Exchange Fund (UK)
    2025
  • MRC doctoral studentship (UK)
    2023-2027
  • EXIST Business Startup Grant (DE)
    2022
  • Deutschlandstipendium (DE)
    2017-2021
News
2026
Prompted by another exceptionally hot summer in Europe, I revisit Climate Context an android app that puts prevailing weather into its historical context we built 3 years ago. Read more
Aug 14
Our paper Automated Distinction of Intimal and Medial Intracranial Arterial Calcification from CT Head was accepted at the SWITCH+ workshop at MICCAI 2026.
Aug 11
I received a best oral presentation award at the SINAPSE Annual Scientific Meeting 2026.
Jun 16
In early 2026 I undertook a six-week research to the Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Read more
Apr 13
Selected Publications (view all )
Calibrated Self-supervised Vision Transformers Improve Intracranial Arterial Calcification Segmentation from Clinical CT Head Scans
Calibrated Self-supervised Vision Transformers Improve Intracranial Arterial Calcification Segmentation from Clinical CT Head Scans

Benjamin Jin, Grant Mair, Joanna M. Wardlaw, Maria del C. Valdés Hernández

Data Engineering in Medical Imaging @ Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Interventions (MICCAI) 2025

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have gained significant popularity in the natural image domain but have been less successful in 3D medical image segmentation. Nevertheless, 3D ViTs are particularly interesting for large medical imaging volumes due to their efficient self-supervised training within the masked autoencoder (MAE) framework, which enables the use of imaging data without the need for expensive manual annotations. intracranial arterial calcification (IAC) is an imaging biomarker visible on routinely acquired CT scans linked to neurovascular diseases such as stroke and dementia, and automated IAC quantification could enable their large-scale risk assessment. We pre-train ViTs with MAE and fine-tune them for IAC segmentation for the first time. To develop our models, we use highly heterogeneous data from a large clinical trial, the third International Stroke Trial (IST-3). We evaluate key aspects of MAE pre-trained ViTs in IAC segmentation, and analyse the clinical implications. We show: 1) our calibrated self-supervised ViT beats a strong supervised nnU-Net baseline by 3.2 Dice points, 2) low patch sizes are crucial for ViTs for IAC segmentation and interpolation upsampling with regular convolutions is preferable to transposed convolutions for ViT-based models, and 3) our ViTs increase robustness to higher slice thicknesses and improve risk group classification in a clinical scenario by 46%.

Calibrated Self-supervised Vision Transformers Improve Intracranial Arterial Calcification Segmentation from Clinical CT Head Scans

Benjamin Jin, Grant Mair, Joanna M. Wardlaw, Maria del C. Valdés Hernández

Data Engineering in Medical Imaging @ Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Interventions (MICCAI) 2025

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have gained significant popularity in the natural image domain but have been less successful in 3D medical image segmentation. Nevertheless, 3D ViTs are particularly interesting for large medical imaging volumes due to their efficient self-supervised training within the masked autoencoder (MAE) framework, which enables the use of imaging data without the need for expensive manual annotations. intracranial arterial calcification (IAC) is an imaging biomarker visible on routinely acquired CT scans linked to neurovascular diseases such as stroke and dementia, and automated IAC quantification could enable their large-scale risk assessment. We pre-train ViTs with MAE and fine-tune them for IAC segmentation for the first time. To develop our models, we use highly heterogeneous data from a large clinical trial, the third International Stroke Trial (IST-3). We evaluate key aspects of MAE pre-trained ViTs in IAC segmentation, and analyse the clinical implications. We show: 1) our calibrated self-supervised ViT beats a strong supervised nnU-Net baseline by 3.2 Dice points, 2) low patch sizes are crucial for ViTs for IAC segmentation and interpolation upsampling with regular convolutions is preferable to transposed convolutions for ViT-based models, and 3) our ViTs increase robustness to higher slice thicknesses and improve risk group classification in a clinical scenario by 46%.

Pre-processing and Quality Control of Large Clinical CT Head Datasets for Intracranial Arterial Calcification Segmentation
Pre-processing and Quality Control of Large Clinical CT Head Datasets for Intracranial Arterial Calcification Segmentation

Benjamin Jin, Maria del C. Valdés Hernández, Alessandro Fontanellea, Wenwen Li, Eleanor Platt, Paul Armitage, Amos Storkey, Joanna M. Wardlaw, Grant Mair

Data Engineering in Medical Imaging @ Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Interventions (MICCAI) 2024

As a potential non-invasive biomarker for ischaemic stroke, intracranial arterial calcification (IAC) could be used for stroke risk assessment on CT head scans routinely acquired for other reasons (e.g. trauma, confusion). Artificial intelligence methods can support IAC scoring, but they have not yet been developed for clinical imaging. Large heterogeneous clinical CT datasets are necessary for the training of such methods, but they exhibit expected and unexpected data anomalies. Using CTs from a large clinical trial, the third International Stroke Trial (IST-3), we propose a pipeline that uses as input non-enhanced CT scans to output regions of interest capturing selected large intracranial arteries for IAC scoring. Our method uses co-registration with templates. We focus on quality control, using information presence along the z-axis of the imaging to group and apply similarity measures (structural similarity index measure) to triage assessment of individual image series. Additionally, we propose superimposing thresholded binary masks of the series to inspect large quantities of data in parallel. We identify and exclude unrecoverable samples and registration failures. In total, our pipeline processes 10,659 CT series, rejecting 4,322 (41%) in the entire process, 1,450 (14% of the total) during quality control, and outputting 6,337 series. Our pipeline enables effective and efficient region of interest localisation for targeted IAC segmentation.

Pre-processing and Quality Control of Large Clinical CT Head Datasets for Intracranial Arterial Calcification Segmentation

Benjamin Jin, Maria del C. Valdés Hernández, Alessandro Fontanellea, Wenwen Li, Eleanor Platt, Paul Armitage, Amos Storkey, Joanna M. Wardlaw, Grant Mair

Data Engineering in Medical Imaging @ Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Interventions (MICCAI) 2024

As a potential non-invasive biomarker for ischaemic stroke, intracranial arterial calcification (IAC) could be used for stroke risk assessment on CT head scans routinely acquired for other reasons (e.g. trauma, confusion). Artificial intelligence methods can support IAC scoring, but they have not yet been developed for clinical imaging. Large heterogeneous clinical CT datasets are necessary for the training of such methods, but they exhibit expected and unexpected data anomalies. Using CTs from a large clinical trial, the third International Stroke Trial (IST-3), we propose a pipeline that uses as input non-enhanced CT scans to output regions of interest capturing selected large intracranial arteries for IAC scoring. Our method uses co-registration with templates. We focus on quality control, using information presence along the z-axis of the imaging to group and apply similarity measures (structural similarity index measure) to triage assessment of individual image series. Additionally, we propose superimposing thresholded binary masks of the series to inspect large quantities of data in parallel. We identify and exclude unrecoverable samples and registration failures. In total, our pipeline processes 10,659 CT series, rejecting 4,322 (41%) in the entire process, 1,450 (14% of the total) during quality control, and outputting 6,337 series. Our pipeline enables effective and efficient region of interest localisation for targeted IAC segmentation.

All publications