Research team receives over $5 million for Canadian paediatric imaging platform

A research team led by some of Canada’s leading research centres including The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) are recipients of a $5.75-million grant to fund a new paediatric imaging platform to support research in child brain health.

The Canadian Pediatric Imaging Platform (C-PIP), a platform currently being developed by the Alberta Children’s Hospital-CAIR Program, SickKids and the Centre Imagine at the CHU Sainte-Justine, aims to leverage the power of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies to understand brain development, with the goal of improving understanding of children’s brain health.

Led by Dr. Signe Bray from the University of Calgary, including Dr. Catherine Lebel (University of Calgary), Dr. Patricia Conrod (CHU Sainte-Justine) and Dr. Anne Wheeler (SickKids), C-PIP was recently announced as one of the recipients of Brain Canada’s Platform Support Grants. This grant is awarded to teams that are creating and/or enhancing centralized shared resources to increase access to equipment, expertise, data and protocols across research networks.  

“C-PIP will offer patients and families the opportunity to benefit from a collaborative network that is designed to accelerate research on brain conditions in children,” says Wheeler, Scientist in the Neurosciences & Mental Health program. “The data we gather at SickKids and other institutions will provide the foundation for future discoveries in paediatric brain development.”

Building a data-informed approach to brain development

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a brain imaging technique used to measure changes in the brain. The brain undergoes many changes from conception to birth and throughout life, and the way in which it develops is affected by many factors. MRI studies can be particularly useful in helping uncover how the brain responds to conditions like pre-term birth or concussions, which can lead to serious consequences in children.

C-PIP aims to recruit children across the country for MRI research studies, increasing the amount of data available on brain development following injury, exposure or genetic alterations and how these disruptions in turn put children and youth at greater risk of behaviour or mental health challenges. It will also foster the adoption of an Open Science approach by facilitating data sharing between researchers. C-PIP will also develop training modules, with the goal of accelerating the adoption of new methods for collecting, processing and analyzing data.

Learn more about this project and funding announcement on the Brain Canada website.

C-PIP funding is made possible through Health Canada's Canada Brain Research Fund (CBRF) and delivered through Brain Canada's 2021 Platform Support Grants Program.