Minimally invasive techniques are used for a wide variety of procedures in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer. Many procedures require insertion of a needle along a straight-line path to the site of the disease. Real-time magnetic resonance (MR) imaging offers the means to visualize the needle relative to a small target lesion and avoid sensitive anatomical structures throughout the procedure. However, operating within the tight space of the MR machine remains very challenging.

This multidisciplinary project will investigate the social, data, and technical issues surrounding design and implementation of a blockchain-based solution for the management of consent for the use of individuals’ “omics” data in medical research. Blockchains are distributed ledgers in which confirmed and validated blocks are organized in an append-only chain using cryptographic links.

This project seeks to develop a mental skills training program for kids in youth hockey. The first part of the project will involve reviewing the literature to find out what is knows about mental skills in kids. We are interested in seeing how kids can use mental skills in sports and hockey and if certain skills are more important depending on the age of the player. Once we have a good idea of what is known about mental skills in youth we will interview elite hockey players to find out what they think of mental skills training and what kinds of mental skills they think are valuable for kids.

To ensure effective cancer treatment, it is vital to match the drug with the molecular characteristics of the patient’s tumor. This research project is focused on developing functional diagnostic assays that may be used eventually in the clinic to stratify patients for targeted therapies. The project will provide a unique opportunity for the interns to work with a clinician at the forefront of cancer treatment and scientists of a partner organization that is developing innovative tools to enable precision cancer medicine.

Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in Canadian women, representing 26 percent of all diagnostics. The overall cancer survival rate has increased from 25% in the 1940s to 60%. Thus, the proportion of breast cancer survivors is increasing significantly. There is a consensus that survivors benefit from exercise during and after treatment. However, the benefits of exercise may vary as a function of the stage of disease, the nature of the medical treatment, and the current lifestyle of the patient.

Medtronic is a global medical device company and leader in patient monitoring technologies that has a key area of interest for developing technology to effectively monitor patients' cerebral blood flow (i.e., perfusion) in relation to systemic blood pressure.
Maintaining a prescribed intra-operative blood pressure range for patients does not guarantee a healthy cerebral blood flow, as they are two independent feedback mechanisms.

"Seismocardiogram (SCG) is a signal that is captured by placing an accelerometer on the human chest. This signal captures very important timing information such as opening and closing of the heart valves. In addition to these timing information, the non-invasive nature of this signal makes it an attractive solution for remote monitoring of patients with heart conditions.
The morphology of SCG signal changes depending on different types of heart conditions and diseases. A mathematical model represents the morphology of a signal in terms of certain parameters.

Fifty percent of diabetic patients are expected to develop some level of a vision threatening problem known as diabetic retinopathy (DR). Although blindness caused by DR is very common amongst diabetic patients, it is preventable in at least 90% of the patients through annual screening and proper follow up. However, financial burdens, lack of access to a specialist (specially in remote areas) to perform routine checkup and the specialists’ busy schedules make it almost impossible for many patients to follow up properly on the status of their disease.

The recent advances in machine learning based on deep neural networks, coupled with the availability of phenomenal storage capacity, are transforming the industrial landscape. However, these novel machine learning approaches are known to be data hungry, as they need to tune a huge number of parameters in order to perform well. As more and more AI based applications are being deployed to learn from personal data, privacy concerns are rising, and more specifically on sensible domains like medicine, finance or mobile related data.

Histopathology is the study and examination of tissue slides under magnification and is the definitive diagnosis for many diseases including cancer. With the advent of whole-slide scanners and image management software systems, computational pathology tools can be created to measure disease in an efficient and objective manner. This is in contrast to the labourious and subjective manual analysis approaches. In Canada, breast cancer is the 2nd cause of cancer death.