Familiar Spires, Advancing Frontiers: When AI Meets the Clinic

Abstract

This is my third Oxford Precision Medicine journey, one marked by familiar spires yet advancing frontiers. This year, I attended as a scholarship recipient under the OXCEP programme established by Oxford to celebrate the inauguration of Academia Sinica's new President, an honour that added special meaning to this return. My time at the Academic Medicine Course at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford, felt like a homecoming, and the 2026 curriculum showed clearly that AI in medicine has moved from promise to practice.

This year's programme went beyond general concepts into disease-specific AI applications, spanning immunotherapy targeting and treatment allocation in oncology, imaging-based diagnostics for MASLD, stroke outcome prediction, and AI-assisted management of chronic hepatitis B and colorectal cancer. New emphasis was also placed on AI ethics, governance, and the translation of innovations into clinical practice, alongside an unexpected but fascinating seminar series on regenerative dentistry, from enamel regeneration to organoid-based tooth engineering.

Beyond the lecture content itself, this visit deepened my understanding of how the United Kingdom, Oxford, and its affiliated hospitals approach AI in healthcare compared with Taiwan, and helped identify concrete breakthrough points for further collaboration. This year's discussions extended well beyond the scope, method, and application of AI itself, encompassing the governance and management of UK Biobank data, including how such large-scale infrastructure responds to major crises, as well as thoughtful reflections on the ethical and cultural dimensions of AI adoption in medicine. Perhaps most valuable of all was the opportunity to observe, firsthand, how Oxford faculty structure their teaching and presentations, and how they formulate incisive questions in real time. Witnessing this pedagogical rigor up close offered lessons that extend well beyond the subject matter itself.

In this talk, I will share how this year's more clinically embedded AI content, together with these broader comparative insights, opens new avenues for Taiwan-Oxford collaboration. Returning a third time, and this time as a designated scholar marking a milestone for Academia Sinica's leadership, I found the experience no less overwhelming, the familiarity only sharpening my sense of how far AI in medicine has advanced, and I hope to convey what this journey reveals about sustaining long-term international research partnerships at an institutional turning point.

Please click here for participating the talk online.