Grant: Idea to Innovation

Our team at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and BC Cancer Research Institute (BCCRI) is developing ViSERA (Visualized & Standardized Environment for Radiomics Analysis), an easy-to-use software that processes medical images to extract valuable quantitative information. We aim to create workflows that can be independently verified, shared, and replicated. We will significantly upgrade ViSERA and its specialized tools via the Galaxy project, a powerful general-purpose platform, in order to generate reproducible and shareable workflows. Graphical workflows will allow users to break down a complex process into smaller modular components, and our software will use AI-powered features, to empower medical image users of different levels of expertise (including medical imaging researchers, students, non-technical medical physicists, and clinical practitioners). Our proposal has significant potential value given the importance of reproducibility in clinical research, and a growing need and demand for software tools that support usable, reusable, reproducible, and shareable workflows. This will help create an even larger community of ViSERA users, to achieve their goals more effectively by validating and building upon one another's findings. Our efforts can bring several benefits to Canada including: 1) Research and innovation in Canada's healthcare sector: platform for researchers and developers to create and test new algorithms, techniques, and approaches for medical image analysis. 2) Cost savings: streamlined workflows to reduce operational costs and increase overall productivity. 3) Economic growth and job creation: development, commercialization, and implementation of new medical image analysis solutions; and 4) Improved patient care and outcomes: implementation of advanced medical imaging software towards more timely diagnoses, appropriate treatment planning, and better monitoring of patient progress.