Four research areas led by our staff have been selected as 4 of only 10 Areas of Excellence funded by the University Grants Committee:
Research into Circulating Fetal Nucleic Acids
Plant and Agricultural Biotechnology
Information Technology
Chinese Medicine Research and Further Development

First university in Hong Kong to be a research partner of the National Institute of Health

By 30 June 2006, CUHK had secured 84 patents covering fields in pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, material science, IT and medical technology

First in the world to show that foetus releases its RNA into the mother's plasma Professor Dennis Lo from The Chinese University of Hong Kong is the first to demonstrate that fetal DNA is present in the plasma of a pregnant woman. This discovery has important implications for the future development of prenatal diagnosis.

World leader in the improvement of rice strains using biotechnology The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) has obtained approval of the Ministry of Science and Technology of China to set up the State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology (CUHK). The laboratory, positioned at the national level, was established with the mission of up-scaling China's agricultural technology to the world frontier to increase agricultural productivity, safeguard food security in China, and improve people's nutrition.

The best high/medium-resolution satellite remotesensing receiving station in Southeast Asia The Satellite Remote Sensing Receiving Station is an important facility of the Institute of Space and Earth Information Science of The Chinese University of Hong Kong. By capturing and processing satellite-sourced remote sensing data, the Station provides useful information to Hong Kong, South China and neighbouring regions in terms of monitoring the environment and natural disasters including landslides, subsidence, earthquakes, tsunamis, floods and typhoons, thereby reducing the risk of civilian casualties and economic loss.

Development of the world's smallest Bluetooth communication module Professor Ke-Li WU of Dept of Electronic Engineering and his research team have successfully developed the world's smallest Bluetooth™ communication module under the support from the Innovation and Technology Fund (“ITF”). The size of the module is 12 by 12 by 1 mm3 which is less than half the size of commercial modules available in the market. This module requires much fewer surface mounted components, and could be applied to any Bluetooth™ enabled consumer wireless products including mobile phone headset, laptop computer, MP3 players and digital cameras.

Founded the network coding theory For a very long time, investigators have been exploring exhaustively to improve the efficiency of the network, generally by extending existing methods. For example, the former Vice-Chancellor of the CUHK, Charles K. Kao has replaced copper cables by optical fiber to reduce attenuation in signal transmission, opening the door to the information age. Before the groundbreaking Network Coding Theory published seven years ago by the aforesaid Professor Shuo-Yen Robert Li, Professor Raymond Wai-Ho Yeung, Dr. Ning Cai of Department of Information Engineering at CUHK and Professor Rudolf Ahlswede from Germany, the network has always been a simple “store-and-forward” system, a mechanism similar to the operation of the postal/transport system in our daily life. Network coding theory replaces routers with coders, which transmit evidence of a message instead of sending the message itself. Receiver can deduce the original message by the evidence collected, leading to enhanced capacity and efficiency.

Reconstruction and 3D visualization of the world's highest-resolution virtual human The Chinese University of Hong Kong has made breakthrough advancements in virtual human research by accomplishing 3D reconstruction and real-time visualization of the world highest resolution virtual human. The research work makes possible for the first time on PC platform to achieve highly interactive photo-realistic visualization of virtual human reconstructed from gigantic digital human dataset. These state-of-the-art real-time rendering and imaging techniques are essential core technologies to support optimal and practical applications of these high quality digital human data sets in anatomy teaching, virtual endoscopy simulation, surgical training and all sorts of human-related simulation.

The world's pioneer in the use of computer navigation for bone tumor surgery The orthopaedic surgeons from The Chinese University of Hong Kong have successfully applied computer navigation to assist resection and reconstruction in bone cancer patients by adapting a commercially available navigation system conventionally used for spine to perform bone tumor surgery. With this new technique, precise resection of a tumor and accurate reconstruction of the resultant bone defect can be achieved. It therefore spares important anatomical structures and preserves function, particularly in anatomically complex areas. The novel management of bone tumor patients has significant implications on paediatric cases as it is particularly useful in joint saving resection which further enables the surgeons to perform limb salvage surgery.