Granting Opportunities

Vector Institute-Temerty Clinical AI Integration Grant: Call for Proposals

PLACEHOLDER Deadline has passed

Overview

• Value: Up to $300,000
• Number of grants available: One grant
• Duration: One year with a possibility of extension to two years without extra funding
• EXTENDED! Letter of Intent Deadline: Date has passed
• Application Procedure: This is a multistage application process. Scroll to the "Submission Process" section to learn about the three stages.

Information Session

To answer questions about the muti-stage application process for the Vector Institute-Temerty Clinical AI Integration Grant, we held an information session for potential applicants in July 2022.

About Us

Vector Institute is an independent, not-for-profit corporation dedicated to research in the field of AI. It strives to drive research excellence and leadership in AI to foster economic growth and improve the lives of Canadians.

T-CAIREM is an interdepartmental centre at the Temerty Faculty of Medicine that serves as a focal point for collaboration among healthcare providers, trainees, researchers, computer scientists, engineers, and industry. Our goal is to transform health through AI.

Grant Objectives 

Despite the accelerating achievements of AI research in health, there has been limited AI integration in clinical practice. The 2022 Vector-Temerty Integration Grant is intended to facilitate the translation of AI models into clinical use by:

• identifying promising AI in medicine research ready for clinical translation that will transform health over the next 20 years

• supporting the integration of promising health research projects that use AI technology in clinical practice

• encouraging researchers to identify and work through challenges associated with successfully integrating AI research into clinical practice

• urging researchers, clinicians, information technology professionals, hospital administrators, and others to collaborate on eliminating barriers to the successful integration of potentially transformative AI technologies into the clinical setting.

Eligibility Criteria 

Applicants must meet the following criteria:

• Primary Applicant/Principal Investigator (PI) must have a T-CAIREM affiliation, hold a University of Toronto faculty appointment, and be eligible to hold grant funding.

• Priority will be given to interdisciplinary project teams.

• Projects that utilize a variety of resources, novel data integrations and/or innovative methodologies are encouraged.

• Primary Applicants for the 2022 Vector-Temerty Integration Grant must present projects that use developed and validated AI models and solutions that are ready to be translated into clinical practice.

• Applicants must present steps required to integrate their research projects into a clinical setting and indicate potential challenges and limitations they foresee.

• Applicants must secure the collaboration of key individuals and/or teams (e.g., clinical divisions/department leads, information technology/ department leads) to enable this integration, either by being co-applicants or via letters of collaboration.

• The Vector-Temerty Integration Grant will be awarded for up to two years to the Principal Applicant who can best articulate an implementation plan and the feasibility of successfully integrating their research project into practice.

• An individual can only submit one application as a Primary Applicant. However, that same individual can be a co-principal investigator or co-investigator or team member on multiple applications.

Application Requirements

Applicants must address the following key areas in their submissions.

A) A mature, validated AI model.

1. Applicants should present a mature AI model, developed around a well-explained translational use case articulated by an identified clinical champion.

2. Applicants must present results of model validation (key performance indicators) against test data with clearly articulated metrics that align with the proposed use case (i.e., what level of performance is required? Why? What is this benchmarked against?)

B) An integration/Implementation strategy:

Clearly describe the following two components as related to AI model integration/implementation:

1. A technical integration strategy that permits model training and integration in real-time, validation including the human-computer interaction component, and actionability during integration. The strategy must include plans for efficient machine learning operations where relevant, including developing real-time data pipelines with processes for feature extraction and data processing, model processing and output extraction, silent testing prior to integration, maintaining and updating the model afterwards, and ongoing monitoring. A description of the data pipeline, as well as expected system uptime statistics and other measures of system resilience, must also be outlined. 

2. A model integration, change management, evaluation, and sustainability strategy that includes:
• Clinician partnership and buy-in
• Informatics partnership and buy-in

Senior leadership support:
• A strategy for communication of model inference to the end-users (e.g., physicians, nurses, etc.)
• A strategy for clinical workflow integration/modification (training and education approaches, change management strategies)
• A performance and outcomes evaluation plan

• A 5-year solution sustainability plan

C) Institutional Alignment and support

Identify key institutional stakeholders who will enable integration by providing:  
1. A letter of support from a hospital CIO/CTO/CDO for the project’s translational goals AND technical integration strategy.
2. A description of a sustainability strategy beyond the silent mode for a prospective non-silent evaluation of the tool as a clinical system. 
3. Support in-kind for the project (biomedical engineering, software development, IT, infosec, etc.). More in-kind support will help identify projects that are likely to be sustainable.

Submission Process

Step One: Letter of Intent (LOI)
• Letter of Intent application: Application deadline has passed
The LOI also asks for CVs of the investigators. This sample PDF CV template can help guide you.
• LOI deadline: Deadline has passed

Step Two: Presentations
After LOIs are reviewed, selected projects will be invited to present in front of the adjudication panel at a later date.

Step Three: Full Grant Application
Projects which pass the presentation stage will be invited to submit a full grant proposal. ­­­

Application Review Procedures

  • Applications will be reviewed by an international panel of experts with both AI and clinical experience.
  • Applicants will be provided with feedback and the opportunity to respond to comments from adjudicators. 
  • Responses will be evaluated, and decisions will be made based on innovation and feasibility being top priorities.
  • Decisions will be announced by January 2023.

Additional benefits of the Award

  • Within the first six months of the award, the PI +/- co-PIs will have the opportunity to present their research at the Temerty Centre Speaker Series
  • The project and related findings will be presented at the T-CAIREM AI in Healthcare Symposium in 2023
  • Opportunities to host the dataset in the T-CAIREM Health Data Nexus
  • A final summary report must be submitted at the end of the project funding period which will be published on the T-CAIREM website (within three months).

FAQ & More Information

Frequently Asked Questions for grant applicants.

• Zoryana Salo, T-CAIREM Centre Administrator.