We’re living in extraordinary times for global medical innovation – and responsible use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is poised to play a truly transformative role. It’s serving an ever-wider set of functions: from synthesizing complex research data, to improving clinical workflows and screening images with AI-driven pattern recognition to improve patient outcomes.
Now, a new nerve center for research, education and innovation in medical AI has launched at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Medicine to facilitate tomorrow’s cross-cutting collaborations and sharpen our community’s competitive edge amid a rapidly changing landscape.
Led by Canada Research Chair in Medical Artificial Intelligence Dr. Khaled El Emam, the Ottawa Medical Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (OMARI) serves as a resource hub designed to harness and scale medical AI to expedite new research discoveries, enhance education, and help achieve better health equity with data-driven tools. ( Join OMARI’s mailing list)
Not only will OMARI showcase the power of AI implementation in partnership with the Faculty of Medicine’s world-class affiliated hospitals and research institutes, it will help strengthen our collaborative teams, prepare medical students to innovate throughout their careers, and establish Ottawa’s flourishing research ecosystem as a recognized leader in this ultra-competitive field.
Driving Smarter, Faster Breakthroughs in Medical AI
It’s crucially important to work at a pace that matches the rapidly evolving world we live in, according to Dr. El Emam.
“Innovation and commercialization can—and should—happen together.”
Dr. Khaled El Emam
— Canada Research Chair in Medical Artificial Intelligence and OMARI director
“Time is a major concern, and we cannot rely on the slower pace that may have worked in the past. We need everyone who can contribute—both inside and outside the university—to appreciate the urgency,” says Dr. El Emam, Full Professor in the School of Epidemiology and Public Health and Senior Scientist at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO) Research Institute.
“Our goal is to move as quickly as possible to stay competitive,” he says.
Commercialization: Shortening the gap between innovation & bedside impact
The new Ottawa-based institute housed within the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Medicine aims to raise awareness about the power of commercialization and medical AI. After all, commercialization helps research move into real-world practice much faster.
For medical researchers, commercialization can be a way to see their most innovative work adopted more quickly, even on global scales. It allows them to have a larger impact, beyond advancing scientific knowledge through publishing papers. This is why it matters: researchers who spend years developing new ideas can turn those ideas into practical tools or solutions that benefit patients sooner.
Dr. El Emam is a deeply knowledgeable guide in how to commercialize research and generate funding. As an entrepreneur, he’s founded or co-founded eight companies involved with facilitating data management and data analytics, areas that are crucial in health care.
“We want to motivate clinicians, researchers, and students to bring their innovations from the lab into the real world. The university has strong resources to help with commercialization, and we want to encourage people to take advantage of them.”
“Innovation and commercialization can—and should—happen together,” Dr. El Emam says. “The first step is creating awareness that commercialization is possible, that others have done it, and that support is available.”
He says OMARI aims to help researchers spin off companies from their labs, continue innovating, and bring their best ideas to market. The institute will highlight non-traditional funding sources that are currently underused, including foundations that support medical AI and company funding through philanthropic groups.
From silos to synergy: Empowering ‘communities of practice’ to co-create medical AI solutions
Numerous talented researchers and clinician investigators at uOttawa and its affiliated hospitals and institutes are leading groundbreaking medical AI work right now, such as creating a world-first AI algorithm that speeds rare-disease diagnoses for children. Our community’s strength is not in one single area—we have experts in many specialties, and many of them are leaders in their fields.
But in recent years, there’s been no common hub to identify investigators’ needs or figure out the best ways of bypassing sources of friction that create bottlenecks for their work.
Dr. El Emam says OMARI was created to address these very gaps and support researchers across the Faculty and affiliated institutes as they begin or continue their impactful medical AI research in, for example, basic science and clinical research. An overarching goal is to help steer more streamlined access to the resources medical investigators require most—such as computing power, software, talent, and funding.
“We want to motivate clinicians, researchers, and students to bring their innovations from the lab into the real world.”
Dr. Khaled El Emam
— uOttawa Faculty of Medicine Professor and OMARI director
“We want to build communities of practice so that investigators and students working on similar problems or using similar tools can share ideas and benefit from each other’s experience,” Dr. El Emam says.
Dr. El Emam stresses that the entire University of Ottawa community and its topflight affiliated partners have an extraordinary breadth of expertise, and as they focus their skills on solving challenges in medical AI —whether technical, ethical, or legal—it will help accelerate progress for everyone.
“Many methods and tools used across different projects are similar, so shared communities can support the core capabilities everyone needs. This approach helps all researchers move faster, and helps everyone better understand the regulatory pathways,” he says.
A recent example of our community’s breadth of expertise was illustrated recently in Kuwait, where Dr. El Emam recently participated in a two-day course focused on Medical AI with other uOttawa experts. The audience included healthcare professionals and researchers.
Empowering the emerging generation of medical innovators
OMARI’s initial focus centers on advancing medical research and ethically deploying AI tools, but upcoming phases will move deeply into education.
Dr. El Emam says a major goal is to strengthen AI education in the Faculty of Medicine for students, learners, and clinicians. “We aim to give them opportunities to become more skilled in AI in general, and in medical AI within their own specialties,” he says,
Not everything needs to be built from scratch. Instead, the institute wants to take advantage of strong work achieved elsewhere so members’ focus can pivot to unsolved problems. For example, the University of Toronto has created robust educational materials in medical AI, and uOttawa can share those with faculty members and clinicians, according to Dr. El Emam.
While education itself matters, so does learning how to use AI effectively in education.
“We teach students the basics, but we also want them to learn how to use AI to code faster and produce analysis results more quickly. This idea applies to all areas: we want students to use AI effectively in their subjects, and we also want to use AI to improve education overall,” says Dr. El Emam, who teaches a machine learning course.
Clearing hurdles & maintaining excellence in medical AI
How does Dr. El Emam envision success for the new institute? Simply put, he says making it easier for researchers to get their important work accomplished will be considered a major success.
“We need everyone who can contribute—both inside and outside the university—to appreciate the urgency.”
Dr. El Emam
— Canada Research Chair in Medical Artificial Intelligence and OMARI director
“Many things are difficult for everyone right now. Accessing data is difficult, getting computing resources is difficult, and receiving funding on time is difficult. Our goal is to make these challenges easier,” he says.
Moving forward, Dr. El Emam stresses that barriers for our deep talent bench are certainly not a lack of ideas or ability—rather it’s these basic obstacles that slow everyone’s progress.
To get past these hurdles, promising momentum is already underway with the integration of three projects:
- The Archimedes health data platform funded by the Brain-Heart Interconnectome that can be used for data governance, computing needs, and other research tasks,
- rolling out a systematic review platform that can speed up the review process, often the first stage of a research project
- advancing our broad community’s adoption of the Fuel iX platform from Telus, which provides an easy-to-use interface for several large language models, essentially making advanced AI capabilities more accessible.
“Once we fix these foundational issues, we can move on to the next level of challenges. These problems exist everywhere, but we believe we can solve them, and that is our goal,” Dr. El Emam says.
