T-CAIREM Grant Winners
Each year, T-CAIREM awards grants to innovative research projects with the potential to transform healthcare through Artificial Intelligence.
Andrew Hope (2025-2026 Dataset Grant)
RADCURE-2
RADCURE is currently the largest dataset of patients with head and neck cancer treated with curative radiation therapy. Until recently, treatment planning imaging, radiation therapy treatment plans, and outcomes data for 3346 patients, curated from a prospective database, including survival, tumour-specific outcomes, and side-effects, were available via The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA). RADCURE is currently being transferred to the HDN to improve data sovereignty and open access. RADCURE-2 will enhance and expand the RADCURE dataset with data designed to accelerate AI research. Additional imaging will be curated including baseline diagnostic imaging (e.g. CT, MR, FDG-PET), on-treatment, and follow-up imaging. Novel textual data will be added including imaging reports and clinical notes including baseline clinical examination and pathology reports. RADCURE-2 will facilitate novel AI/ML research including longitudinal imaging analysis and linguistic processing. Making RADCURE-2 available via T-CAIREM’s Canadian platform will ensure stability and open data access.
Co-PI: Wei Xu, Clinician Scientist, Princess Margaret Cancer Centre and Professor Biostatistics, University of Toronto.
Mohamed Abdalla (2025-2026 Dataset Grant)
An Open-Source De-identification Dataset for natural language processing of audio and text notes from patient clinical encounters
This project aims to develop a large, open-source dataset to advance research on clinical text and audio de-identification. Current AI efforts are limited by small, homogeneous datasets and high annotation costs, restricting progress in clinical AI. Our dataset will be composed of thousands of diverse note types, such as referral letters paired with first consultation notes, admission and discharge summaries. We will also incorporate clinical audio recordings with corresponding transcripts, enabling one of the first multimodal benchmarks for de-identification. This resource will support research beyond de-identification, including triage modeling, referral quality assessment, speech recognition performance, and real-time documentation analysis. This dataset will equip researchers and healthcare institutions with the tools to evaluate de-identification methods and to build new AI applications, ultimately accelerating safe, privacy-preserving clinical NLP innovation and education. We have piloted our data generation approach, capturing 10% of the data and highlighting its feasibility. Co-PI: Dr. Amol Verma, Clinician-Scientist, UHN-University Health Network and Temerty Professor in AI Research and Education in Medicine, University of Toronto.
2024
Dr. Sharmistha Mishra
Affiliation: Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto
Research Project: Dr. Mishra's study, "Impact of unequal testing on vaccine effectiveness estimates across two study designs: a simulation study" was published in the May 2025 issue of Nature Communications.
Award: DSI/T-CAIREM Catalyst Grant - $100,000 CAD
Dr. Tom Chau
Affiliation: Bloorview Research Institute, Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital
Research Project: Decoding unintelligible speech: a conversational context-aware assistive technology for children with complex communication needs
Award: DSI/T-CAIREM Catalyst Grant - $100,000 CAD
2023
Dr. Andrea Tricco
Affiliation: Associate Professor at the University of Toronto in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health & Institute of Health Policy, Management, and Evaluation
Research Project: Artificial intelligence decision support tool to assess the quality of systematic reviews on the same topic
Award: AI for Population Health and Health Systems Implementation Grant - $150,000 CAD
Dr. Girish Kulkarni
Affiliation: Department of Surgery, University of Toronto
Research Project: NIMBLE: An early warning system for tumour recurrence and progression for non-muscle invasive bladder cancer
Award: Temerty Innovation Grant - $100,000 CAD
Dr. Mark I. Boulos
Affiliation: Sunnybrook Research Institute; Associate Professor, Division of Neurology, Department of Medicine, U of T
Research Project: Advancing Clinical Outcomes Using Comprehensive Sleep Health and Polysomnography Data
Award: Health Data Nexus Dataset Grant - $50,000 CAD
Dr. William T. Tran
Affiliation: Associate Professor, Department of Radiation Oncology and U of T; Scientist, Sunnybrook Research Institute
Research Project: Advancing Artificial Intelligence Applications Using High-Resolution Digital Tumor Biopsies of High-Risk Breast Cancer
Award: Health Data Nexus Dataset Grant - $50,000 CAD
Two of this year’s 13 Catalyst grants administered by the Data Sciences Institute (DSI) were co-funded with T-CAIREM.
Dr. Aaron Conway
Affiliation: Lawrence S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing, U of T
Research project: Pain Detection in Masked Faces during Procedural Sedation
Collaborators: Babak Taati, Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, KITE, University Health Network); Sebastian Mafeld (Toronto General Hospital Research Institute, University Health Network)
Award: Catalyst Grant - $100,000 CAD
Dr. Sebastian D. Goodfellow
Affiliation: Department of Civil and Mineral Engineering, Faculty of Applied Science Engineering, U of T
Research project: Accelerating machine learning in healthcare: Solving the labelling bottleneck
Collaborators: Mjaye Mazwi (Translational Medicine Labs, SickKids), Anica Bulic, (Translational Medicine Labs, SickKids), and Melissa McCradden (Genetics & Genome Biology Labs, SickKids).
Award: Catalyst Grant - $100,000 CAD
2022
Prof. Yu Sun
Affiliation: UofT Engineering; Tier I Canada Research Chair; Director of UofT Robotics Institute
Research project: Non-Invasive Selection of Single Spermatozoa with High DNA Integrity for In Vitro Fertilization (IVF)
Collaborators: Prof. Clifford Librach, U of T, Faculty of Medicine, Department of Obstetrics & Gynaecology
Award: 2022/23 Vector Institute-Temerty Clinical AI Integration Grant - $300,000 CAD
Prof. Frank Rudzicz, Prof. Noah Crampton, Prof. Andrew Pinto
Affiliation: Department of Computer Science, U of T
Research project: Artificial Intelligence Automation to Improve Family Medicine Workflow
Co-Investigators: Omri Nachmani, Hanu Chaudhari, Stephanie Garies, Jane Zhao, Christopher Meaney
Award: Family Medicine (FAFM & CFPC)-Temerty Innovation Grant - $100,000 CAD
2021
Dr. Shaf Keshavjee
Affiliation: UHN Research
Research project: Advanced Ex Vivo Organ Assessments for Clinical Lung Transplant Using AI.
Award: Temerty Innovation Grant - $200,000 CAD
Dr. Devin Singh
Affiliation: Hospital for Sick Children
Research project: Machine Learning-Based Innovation in Ocular Pediatric Assessment Using point of care ultrasound
Award: Temerty Innovation Grant - $200,000 CAD
Dr. Mojgan Hodaie
Affiliation: UHN
Research project: An Artificial Intelligence-based MR Imagine Reconstruction Framework
Award: CIFAR-Temerty Innovation Catalyst Grant - $130,000 CAD