• Gabriel Couture

    M.Sc. candidate
    Faculté des sciences et de génie
    Université Laval

    Student
    Directeur.e(s) de recherche
    Philippe Després
    Start date
    Title of the research project
    Robust data pipelines in radiation oncology
    Description

    This project consists of establishing good practices in health data management and building a software infrastructure in order to apply them.

    We have developed pipelines that allow daily recovery of brachytherapy treatment data in order to calculate and store their dosimetric indices in a database dedicated to research. These indices are essential for planning radiotherapy treatments and for estimating their quality.

    The aggregation of these indices allows different researchers such as bio-statisticians and radiation oncologists to carry out studies on larger data sets.

  • Samuel Ouellet

    M.Sc. candidate
    Faculté des sciences et de génie
    Université Laval

    Student
    Directeur.e(s) de recherche
    Philippe Després
    Start date
    Title of the research project
    Automated extraction pipelines in medical imaging
    Description

    The objective of this project is to extract a set of relevant data from the files produced by medical imaging devices.

    The process consists of building ETL (extract-transform-load) pipelines to make the data consumable for analysis and visualization. An example of analysis consists in observing the trend in dose administered to patients according to the establishment, protocol or device used, in order to possibly identify non-standard practices.

    The data extracted could also guide practice by making it possible to assess the relevance of certain studies, and thus to optimize resources in the health network.

  • Keven Voyer

    M.Sc. candidate
    Faculté des sciences et de génie
    Université Laval

    Student
    Directeur.e(s) de recherche
    Philippe Després
    Collaboration
    Régie de l'assurance maladie du Québec
    Start date
    Title of the research project
    Proof of concept for the development of a decision support tool allowing approval exceptional medications through artificial intelligence
    Description

    An exception drug is a drug that is not usually covered by the public drug insurance plan (RPAM). The measures implemented at the RAMQ for exceptional drugs allow the entire population to obtain coverage for certain drugs if they are used in compliance with the indications recognized by the Institut national d'excellence en santé et services sociaux (INESSS). Exception drugs are now a large and constantly increasing part of total spending on prescription drugs.

    For the RPAM, one of the ways to control this increase is to reimburse these drugs according to pre-established rules. Currently, the system automatically processes around 20% of requests while the rest are directed to a case-by-case analysis, which generates delays.

    This project is to help the business sector respond more quickly to requests for approval of exception drugs. A tool will be developed based on 15 years of data collected by the current system, and will aim to increase the number of requests processed automatically.

  • Louis Archambault

    Associate Professor
    Faculté des sciences et de génie
    Université Laval

  • Anne-Sophie

    Anne-Sophie Charest

    Associate Professor
    Faculté des sciences et de génie
    Université Laval

    Anne-Sophie Charest is an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistic at Université Laval. She is the director of the certificate and bachelor programs in statistic.

    She holds a bachelor degree in probability and statistic from McGill University (2007) and a doctor degree in statistic from Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania, 2012).

    Her research interests are focused on statistical data confidentiality including synthetic data set creation and differential confidentiality criterion, survey data analysis, treatment of missing data and the Bayesian inference approach.

    Anne-Sophie Charest is a regular member at the Big Data Research Center (BDRC)-Université Laval and the Mathematics Research Center (MRC)-Université de Montréal.

  • Isabel Fortier

    Assistant Professor
    Faculté de médecine
    McGill University

    Dr. Isabel Fortier is researcher at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) where she leads the Maelstrom Research program.

    This program aims to provide the international research community from diverse disciplines with resources (expertise, methods, and software) to leverage and support data harmonization and integration across studies. The Maelstrom Research team develops methods and software, conducts methodological research, generates comprehensive catalogues of study metadata, and creates infrastructures supporting data management, harmonization and co-analysis.

    The team is collaborating on or leading the data cataloguing and harmonization activities of a number of national and international projects including IALSA (Integrative Analysis for Longitudinal Study Analysis, more than a 100 studies), ReACH (Research Advancement through Cohort Cataloguing and Harmonization, 26 studies) and CPTP (Canadian Partnership for Tomorrow Project, 5 studies).

    Ultimately, Maelstrom Research resources help to optimize the use of existing research data, enhance capacity for national and international collaborative and cross-disciplinary research (outputs generated faster and at lower cost), and improve quality of research practices.

  • Louis-Martin Rousseau

    Professor
    Département de mathématiques et de génie industriel
    Polytechnique Montréal

    After completing his PhD in computer science and operations research at Université de Montréal, professor Louis-Martin Rousseau joined the Mathematics and Industrial Engineering Department at Polytechnique Montréal in 2003.

    He was one of the first researchers to investigate the hybridization of classical operations research methods and constraint programming, which comes from artificial intelligence. His current research focuses on transportation logistics, scheduling and resource optimization in healthcare.

  • Nadia Lahrichi

    Associate Professor
    Département de mathématiques et de génie industriel
    Polytechnique Montréal

    Nadia Lahrichi is an associate professor at the Department of Mathematics and industrial engineering at Polytechnique Montreal.

    Her research is mainly focused towards applying modeling and operational research tools to improve patient flow in the healthcare system. She uses exact, metaheuristics and discrete event simulation approaches to tackle patient and resource scheduling problems. She actively collaborates with various organizations from the heath care sector to solve practical problems such as patient booking for chemo, radiotherapy treatments and diagnostic imaging, nurse and physician scheduling, operating room planning and scheduling or homecare planning.

    From the Canadian Operational research society, professor Lahrichi has received the award for outstanding application of operational research for solving the home health care routing and scheduling problem.

  • France Légaré

    Professor
    Faculté de médecine
    Université Laval

    First trained as an architect, Dr. France Légaré has practiced family medicine in Quebec since 1990 and is a full professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Emergency Medicine at Université Laval (Quebec, Canada). She is an internationally recognized leader in shared decision-making (SDM) and knowledge translation research. In 2005, she obtained her PhD in Population Health from the University of Ottawa under the supervision of Dr. Annette O’Connor.

    From June 2006 to May 2016, Dr. Légaré held the title of Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Implementation of Shared Decision Making in Primary Care. As of June 1st 2016, she holds the title of Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Shared Decision Making and Knowledge Translation.

    Dr. Légaré was nominated PI/co-PI on 35 grants and Co-I on 49 grants in the past seven years. She has published more than 363 papers, 343 of which are PubMed indexed; her H index is 69 and she has > 25 086 citations (Google Scholar). In 2017, 2018 and 2019, she was listed as one of the top 1% most cited scientists worldwide (Clarivate Analytics), indicating that her work has been repeatedly judged by her peers to be of notable significance and utility. A SDM bibliometric analysis recently identified France Légaré as the person who has participated in the most studies (n=101) since 2009. Her research program aims at implementing shared decision making in clinical practices with a focus on home care and prenatal screening programs.

    In addition to SDM, primary care and knowledge translation, she is also an expert in implementation science and scale-up science. With her colleagues she has developed several SDM interventions for various contexts and trained a large number of healthcare professionals. For example, she has trained more than 270 family physicians in SDM and optimal use of antibiotics for acute respiratory infections. More recently, she trained more than 600 healthcare professionals in an interprofessional approach to SDM in home care.

    Lastly, her team was the first to create an online inventory of SDM training programs, which is updated on a regular basis. All of her research initiatives can be consulted on http://www.decision.chaire.fmed.ulaval.ca/france-legare.

  • Catherine Regis

    Catherine Régis

    Professor
    Faculté de droit
    Université de Montréal

    Catherine Régis is a full professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of Montreal, holder of the Canada Research Chair in Collaborative Culture in Health Law and Policy (since 2013), co-responsible for the Hub santé –politique, organizations and law (H-POD) and founding member of the JusticIA research group (justice-ia.com). She is also a researcher at the Research Center in Public Law, at the Research Center of the University Hospital Center of the University of Montreal (CRCHUM) and at the Observatoire international sur les impacts sociétaux de l’intelligence artificielle et du numérique (OBVIA).

    She holds a law degree from the University of Montreal, a master's degree in health law from the University of Sherbrooke, a certificate in clinical ethics from the University of Geneva and a doctorate in law (SJD) from the University from Toronto.

    Professor Régis has been a member of the Quebec Bar since 1999 and an accredited mediator. Recipient of several prizes, grants and subsidies, notably from the Canada Research Chairs program, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Quebec Research Funds, the Ministry of International Relations and La Francophonie and the Georg Stellari Fund, she is regularly contacted by the health network as a consultant and trainer. She collaborates with several interdisciplinary and international research teams, notably in medicine, machine learning, management, engineering, public health and psychology.

    She is a member of various committees in the health and social services sector, including that of the Ethics Committee from the Public Health Agency of Canada and the University of Montreal’s Health Data Science Committee. She is regularly sought out as a visiting professor in various countries, including France and Israel. His work, published in numerous national and international journals, focuses mainly on digital innovation in health, collaborative governance in health systems, the normative action of the World Health Organization and innovative models of medical practice.

  • Discover

    Featured project

    Prostate cancer is the second most frequent cancer and the fifth leading cause of cancer death among men. To improve patient outcomes, treatment must be personalized based on accurate prognosis. Nomograms already exist to identify patients at low risk for recurrence based on preoperative clinical information, but these tools do not use patients’ medical images.

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