Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics to hold virtual open house on Monday, June 21

By Sean O’Malley
Senior Writer

Dr. Sean Hill is marking the second anniversary of the opening of the Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics (KCNI) with a combination of pride and excitement.

“I am immensely proud of the hard work every member of the KCNI team has put in to get us to this point,” says the centre’s inaugural director. “I am excited to be able to show all our patients, clinicians and researchers how integrated neuroinformatics has become with all aspects of research and patient care at CAMH.”

For much of the past two years, the KCNI has been kind of like a new building under construction.

“We have been building a scaffolding,” says Operations Director David Rotenberg in reference to one of the KCNI’s signature achievements to date: the BrainHealth Databank, which has so far collected about a quarter of a million data points from over 1,000 patients at 15 different clinical pathways at CAMH. “Our dual role as a hospital and an academic research centre makes CAMH the ideal setting to apply the principles of neuroinformatics to provide more personalized mental health care.”

The KCNI is already conducting studies using big data and machine learning to analyze mental healthcare data, including one examining treatment outcomes for first-episode psychosis and another looking at the genetic risks for psychosis from cannabis use.

But much of the work done so far has been behind the scenes creating and mapping out a digital infrastructure at CAMH that will allow the KCNI to put some of its big ideas into practice.  Now after two years of hard work, patients, clinicians and researchers are going to be able see for themselves some of the fruits of KCNI’s labours in the near future.

Two prominent examples which will be made operational in the months ahead, are a decision support dashboard intended for use by all frontline CAMH clinicians, as well as a parallel version designed specifically for patients. These interactive data visualization dashboards will enable clinicians and patients to monitor at-a-glance how each individual patient’s mental health is changing over the course of their treatment.

To mark its two-year anniversary, KCNI will host an all-day virtual open house on Monday, June 21, where KCNI team will share highlights from the last year and speak to future developments. The event will also feature a panel discussion on how digital health data and brain simulations can transform mental health care in the near future. 

For further reading on the KCNI, also see this month’s edition of The Walrus magazine, which ran an in-depth cover story chronicling the work of the KCNI since its inception.