Cardiomyopathy is a leading cause of heart failure in children, and there are currently no effective treatments. Could emerging therapies that successfully target the root cause of the condition in adults also work well in children? That was the question Dr....
In the realm of cardiac health, an exciting new study has cast light on the intricate details of our hearts, revealing significant differences between the left and right ventricles' fibroblasts. This research, conducted by a team of dedicated scientists from the...
For children diagnosed with complex heart conditions like hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), the diagnosis can be frightening for families and challenging for healthcare providers since the trajectory of the condition is often uncertain. As a leading cause of sudden...
An innovative cardiovascular start-up, HDAX Therapeutics, is the latest company to win $250,000 in funding following another year of the Ted Rogers Centre for Heart Research’s Entrepreneurship for Cardiovascular Health Opportunities (ECHO) program. The ECHO program...
Several members of the Ted Rogers Centre for Heart Research (TRCHR) participated in Vascular 2023, a five-day conference held in Montreal from October 25-29. The conference is a hallmark event organized by several Canadian specialist and research organizations,...
Researchers at the Ted Rogers Centre for Heart Research have developed an innovative approach to better understanding the complex signaling mechanisms underlying heart failure. A recent publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) offers...
The Ted Rogers Centre funds a trio of advanced data-driven initiatives that are transforming heart failure research and personalized care now and into the future.
They are led by a collaborative team of software developers, programmer analysts, biostatisticians, data scientists, data engineers, data managers, regulatory specialists, cardiologists, and trainees.
The Digital Cardiovascular Health Platform (DCHP) is our hallmark infrastructure, which enables researchers and clinicians to discover, integrate, store and share data on all heart patients at UHN. It also accelerates digital health innovations and data-driven research.
Our Ted Rogers Computational Program fuses data science, machine learning and traditional statistical methods to the benefit of patients, clinicians and investigators.
Experts in our Program in Data Science develop novel studies, programs and quality improvement projects, establish guidelines and best practices for statistical analyses, program hands-on training to all members, and collaborate with leading academic health sciences centres.
The Digital Cardiovascular Health Platform unlocks siloed, un-linked, and even previously discarded data by capturing and integrating different streams of new patient data. This data lake pulls from many sources including EMRs, test results, clinical notes, research data, machine data, and readings from ECG machines, echocardiography images and wearable technologies.
This extraordinary innovation allows our clinical teams to perform advanced analytics into risk analysis (causes), prognosis and ideal treatment for each individual with heart failure.
This immense data lake – combined with AI and machine learning techniques to analyze it – allows us to streamline clinical and basic research with new knowledge of heart failure fed by millions of patient encounters and real-world evidence.
Our investigators can now study this disease from new angles of discovery and perform pragmatic clinical trials. At any given time, there are at least 200 active analytics/research data management projects underway.
An early highlight of this program was in successfully extracting breath-by-breath data from a cardiopulmonary exercise test machine, then integrating it with EMR data and analyzing the results. This model is able to calculate a patient’s risk of progressing to end-stage heart failure in one year. It was over 84% accurate predicting outcomes – a rate higher than any validated model.
Through our industry-leading analytics and advanced machine learning techniques, teams can perform complex – previously impossible – analyses to bring personalized medicine to the forefront.
On one hand, it generates new studies that bring us closer to predictive care, such as how weather conditions influence outcomes or how exercise therapy can improve the heart health of children and youth cancer survivors.
And on another, our AI-driven predictive analytics boost person-centred efficient care while driving higher and higher levels of patient safety and quality improvement.
A testament to the power and potential of the DCHP is that it has changed research and care at Canada’s largest hospital network.
Our DCHP laid the groundwork for UHN’s mission to “unleash the power of technology and innovation” and was the foundation for a hospital-wide Digital Health Platform.
Over time, the DCHP’s innovative data environment will produce more effective predictive models, algorithms and novel findings that prevent heart failure before it arises.