Alberta Innovates provides $12.4 million to innovators

EDMONTON – Some of the most common reasons for a visit to an emergency department are injuries to your shoulders, arms, elbows and wrists. Determining the extent of these types of injuries may take months from booking an MRI until the scan. An X-RAY requires both time and an expert to interpret the results, causing a delay in treatment. What if there was a better way to determine these upper-body injuries?

Dr. Abhilash Hareendranathan, from the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Alberta, is a recipient of an Accelerating Innovations into Care (AICE)-Concepts award from Alberta Innovates, and believes he has an answer to that question.

Dr. Hareendranathan is looking at using Point of Care Ultrasound (POCUS) to determine injuries in the upper body. The method is faster, safer, and provides immediate information for clinicians. The challenge is, conventional POCUS requires significant training time and expertise to interpret the results. Dr. Hareendranathan has developed an artificial intelligence tool to aid with that. The Ultrasound Arm Injury Detection (US-AID) allows healthcare providers to collect high-quality scans that provide accurate results to treat upper-body injuries.

Dr. Hareendranathan was successful in Alberta Innovates’ AICE-Concepts program. This unique opportunity is part of the suite of AICE programs designed to advance health technologies toward market adoption with the aim of providing positive economic and health impacts for Alberta. He was one of 10 applicants who were successful in this year’s competition. Awardees will share nearly $6.3 million dollars in funding. Projects include everything from new diagnostics for detecting infectious diseases to new personalized treatments for brain disorders. Applicants have between 24 – 36 months to complete their projects.

“Creating innovation in the health system requires support at all levels, from the earliest stages right through to those that are commercially viable. When innovators like those in the AICE-Concepts and LevMax-Health programs succeed, we achieve better patient outcomes and a stronger economy,” said Laura Kilcrease (pictured), CEO, Alberta Innovates.

LevMax-Health, another Alberta Innovates’ program, is also announcing its funding results today. LevMax-Health helps cultivate a health innovation ecosystem in Alberta. It provides support for emerging areas of health research that are developing solutions for unmet clinical needs. Projects funded by LevMax-Health include faster detection of brain MRIs for newborn infants, all the way to advanced wearable robotics. This year, 10 awards are being provided to researchers and innovators around Alberta for a total of $6.1 million. Projects must be completed between 24 – 36 months.

“We congratulate all the successful applicants. Funding medical innovations is critically important to advancing technologies from the lab into clinics around Alberta. That’s not only good for health innovation but to providing health care for all Albertans,” said Nate Glubish, Minister of Technology and Innovation

Here are the successful projects:

• Dr. Mohammed Almekhlafi with the University of Calgary for Wearable Sensors for Real-Time Monitoring and Detection of Stroke in Hospitalized Patients.
• Philip Barber with Andromeda Medical Imaging Inc. for streamlining acute stroke diagnosis and treatment.
• Richard Fahlman with the University of Alberta for integrating Dark Data into Diagnostic Biomarkers
• Christiaan Fulton with ChromaCare Labs Inc. for Mobile-based At-home Lab Testing (MALT).
• Walter Maksymowych from the U of A for Precision Diagnostics and Prognostics for Chronic Inflammatory Arthritis.
• Samuel Pichardo from U of C for developing a Neurostimulation device for personalized brain disorders treatment.
• Dylan Pillai at U of C for AI research into infectious disease outcomes.
• Robert Sheldon at 42 Health Sensor Holdings Ltd. for developing artificial intelligence for a wearable blood pressure monitor.
• Lindsey Westover at the U of A for for Scoliosis management.
• Adam Cheng at the U of C for innovations in Augmented Reality and Screen-based innovations for treating cardio-pulmonary arrest.
• Nils Daniel Forkert at U of C to develop an improved computer model of healthy and impaired visual processing.
• Ping Liu at U of C for helping treat kidney failure
• Robert Miller at U of C for diagnostics in detecting coronary Artery Disease.
• Milad Nazarahari for An Intelligent Robotic System for post-stroke rehabilitation.
• Emily Rogers-Bradley at U of C for Advancing wearable robotics for health applications
• Tolu Sajobi at U of C for Development and evaluation of a patient-centered electronic outcome assessment (strokePRO) system for acute stroke trials
• Roberto Souza at U of C for Faster Newborn Brain MRIs
• Eleni Stroulia at U of A for developing further treatments for older adults
• Roger Zemp at U of A for High-Speed Metabolic and Molecular Virtual Histology.