University of Ottawa launches AI medical hub

OTTAWA – The University of Ottawa is launching a new center for research, education and innovation in medical Artificial Intelligence (AI) to facilitate cross-cutting collaborations while sharpening the university’s competitive edge in this rapidly changing landscape.

Led by Canada Research Chair in Medical Artificial Intelligence Dr. Khaled El Emam (pictured), the Ottawa Medical Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (OMARI) will serve as a resource hub for harnessing and scaling medical AI to expedite new research discoveries, enhance education, and help achieve better health equity with data-driven tools.

Housed within the Faculty of Medicine, OMARI aims to showcase the power of AI implementation in partnership with the university’s world-class affiliated hospitals and research institutes, while helping to strengthen collaborative teams, prepare medical students to continually innovate and establish Ottawa’s flourishing research ecosystem as a recognized leader in this ultra-competitive field.

“We want to motivate clinicians, researchers, and students to bring their innovations from the lab into the real world. Innovation and commercialization can – and should – happen together,” said 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.

OMARI will help researchers spin off companies from their labs, allowing them to 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. OMARI should create a common hub to identify investigators’ needs and to address gaps, steering researchers to access resources such as computing power, software, talent, and funding.

“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. “Our goal is to move as quickly as possible to stay competitive.”

OMARI’s initial focus centers on advancing medical research and ethically deploying AI tools, but upcoming phases will move deeply into 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,” said Dr. El Emam, who teaches a machine learning course.