Liu was presented with the Hans Popper Award at this year's fall meeting of the Austrian Society of Pathology in Innsbruck in recognition of outstanding scientific accomplishment in the entire field of pathology with a focus on applied clinical research. Recently published in the British Journal of Cancer paper, her paper titled "Tumor Infiltrating Lymphocytes and Survival After Adjuvant Chemotherapy in Patients with Gastric Cancer: Post-hoc Analysis of the CLASSIC Trial" recounted Liu and her co-authors’ applied digital image analysis to examine two international study collectives (= total study participants) of gastric cancer.

They demonstrated that adjuvant (supportive) chemotherapy can improve the generally poor prognosis of gastric carcinomas containing a low density of infiltrating lymphocytes. This effect, however, was not demonstrated in tumors of high density of infiltrating lymphocytes. These findings could be enormously helpful when making treatment decisions in the future.