Multi-institutional VR-enabled digital health platform for precision care

Multi-institutional VR-enabled digital health platform integrating imaging biomarkers and electronic health record (EHR) data for precision care

Using secure AI and virtual reality to turn medical images and health records into better treatment decisions, and diagnoses.

Doctors rely on medical imaging, medical history, and electronic health records to diagnose disease and plan treatment. New approaches, including artificial intelligence (AI), hold great promise for transforming healthcare by improving diagnosis, treatment planning, and understanding how well patients will respond to therapy.

AI can identify patterns in medical images and health records that are difficult or impossible for humans to detect. However, developing these technologies requires large amounts of data, which is often difficult to access because of patient privacy concerns. Hospitals cannot easily share data, thus slowing progress. Our approach allows hospitals to work together without moving or sharing patient data. This enables AI tools to be developed and tested across many hospitals, making them more reliable and ready for real-world clinical care.

This project will span the country—from British Columbia to Newfoundland—creating a secure, privacy-preserving platform that links medical images and electronic health records across multiple hospitals. Through this initiative, we will develop new medical technologies that use AI and integrate with VR for spine surgery, trauma, and cancer care. Our work focuses on using AI to support the interpretation and quantification of medical imaging, and combining this information with electronic health record data such as treatments, blood work, and basic patient information (for example age, sex, height, and weight).

This project involves building both a national federated platform that can support many future AI-enabled medical technologies, and developing specific tools that directly improve patient care. Clinically, this work will support earlier diagnosis, personalized treatment planning, and data-driven patient management. In oncology, tumour and musculoskeletal analyses will improve treatment monitoring and quality of life. In spine and trauma care, quantitative measures of body composition can help identify patient frailty and guide care before treatment, reducing complications and hospital stays.

“This project, funded by the Digital Health Innovation Fund, makes it possible to tackle a problem that no single institution can solve alone. It provides the infrastructure and governance needed to link imaging and health record data across Canada in a responsible way, which is exactly what’s needed to translate AI research into real benefits for patients.”