Project Overview

MRI is a powerful tool for measuring how the brain changes across life and how conditions like preterm birth or concussion can disrupt the brain’s development. Across Canada, three leading pediatric MRI research centres are developing the Canadian Pediatric Imaging Platform (C-PIP). C-PIP is launching as a partnership between the Alberta Children’s Hospital-CAIR Program, SickKids and the new Centre Imagine at the Centre Hospitalier Ste. Justine and aims to expand to include partner sites across the country.

C-PIP will make it easier to recruit children across the country into research studies to better understand how the brain’s development is disrupted by injury, exposures and genetics and how these disruptions in turn put children and youth at greater risk for behavioural and mental health challenges. C-PIP will also make it easier for researchers to share data and adopt more ‘Open Science’ approaches. We will develop training modules and facilitate the scaling of new methods for collecting, processing and analysing data. C-PIP will collect data from children from birth across adolescence and build a national high-precision reference sample that can be used to understand how brain disruptors alter neurodevelopment. A suite of demonstration projects will showcase the platform’s ability to support novel research questions into: 1) how concussions alter the brain, 2) how brain development is disrupted in children with rare genetic conditions, and 3) how through cross-site collaboration we can rapidly make new methods like Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopic Imaging (MRSI) available to the pediatric neuroimaging community.

Principal Investigator

Signe Bray , University of Calgary

Partners and Donors

University of Calgary: Alberta Children's Hospital Research Institute

University of Calgary: Hotchkiss Brain Institute

Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Sainte-Justine Foundation

SickKids