Flywheel and Google Partner to Deliver Industry's First Cloud-based MRI Research Center at Columbia University

MINNEAPOLIS, July 31, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Flywheel, the research informatics company, announces the deployment of its medical imaging research platform at Columbia University on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The Flywheel platform has been used by the Columbia neuroscience and biomedical imaging community and their internal and external collaborators at Columbia's Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute since June 2017. With rapid user adoption and increased demands for large-scale data management and computation, Columbia has expanded the Flywheel program and migrated to Google Cloud.

Developed at the direction of Dr. John Thomas Vaughan, Director of the Columbia Magnetic Resonance Research Center and Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Radiology, and Applied Physics and Math and a principal investigator at Columbia's Zuckerman Institute, the Flywheel platform is science and industry's first fully integrated cloud-based MRI research center. The launch at the Zuckerman Institute is the first node of a cloud-based Columbia MR Research Center (CMRRC), which will connect the Institute, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, Columbia's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and external collaborators in greater New York and around the world.  

Columbia's Zuckerman Institute has contracted Flywheel to facilitate the efficient, GCP-based data acquisition, archiving, operations and connectivity with other Center laboratories and collaborators. Flywheel provides a complete data management solution to meet the challenges of large, multi-modal imaging data sets as required by multi-center studies and machine learning based research. Flywheel on the Google Cloud Platform will meet the CMRRC data management requirements for unlimited, on-demand computational power and data storage. "Flywheel, together with the GCP are the nervous system of our Center," said Dr. Vaughan, "providing the innervation for the many coordinated functions of a modern, distributed laboratory potentially spanning the world. Leveraging the power of the cloud is obvious and central to the future of scientific investigation. We are fortunate to have Flywheel and GCP working with us at the Zuckerman Institute, connecting our Center across Columbia's campuses as well as extend it to our collaborators around the world."

"We are excited to have Flywheel at the heart of Columbia's MRI research cloud initiative," said Travis Richardson, Flywheel President. "With our partners at Google, we have created a truly innovative, highly scalable, and secure solution allowing leading research institutions to keep pace with the demands of modern imaging research including multi-modality studies, multi-center collaboration, and machine learning."

About Flywheel:

Flywheel is a leading medical imaging informatics platform for researchers that's transforming the way research is conducted in academia, clinics and pharma industry. By providing tools to automate scientific data management, scale analytic computing, and securely share data and algorithms, we're on a mission to unleash the medical imaging community's creative energy by designing a more powerful way of doing research. Flywheel is headquartered in Minneapolis, MN, and has offices in the Bay Area, Boston, and Budapest. For more information on our mission and products, visit http:/flywheel.io.

SOURCE Flywheel

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