Cleveland Clinic set to open two imaging centers with industry and foundation partners.
Leaders from Cleveland Clinic and Canon announced the partnership Nov. 27, 2024.
Cleveland Clinic has been a trailblazer in magnetic resonance imaging technology for more than four decades, opening the first building designed to house MRI machines – the Meyer Center for Magnetic Resonance Imaging – in 1983. The academic medical center further advanced its leadership in the field last fall with the announcement of two cutting-edge medical imaging centers – an imaging research center in partnership with Canon Inc. and the Osteoarthritis Imaging Center in collaboration with the Arthritis Foundation.
Creating Technologies that Transform Patient Care
Cleveland Clinic and Canon will form a strategic research partnership to develop innovative imaging and healthcare IT technologies aimed at improving diagnosis, care and outcomes for patients. The two organizations expect to establish a comprehensive imaging research center that brings together a cross-institutional team of clinician scientists, researchers and engineers. Joint research projects will focus on cardiology, neurology and musculoskeletal medicine and will have three primary components – preclinical imaging, human imaging and image analysis.
“There are so many synergies that we have between the two institutions,” said Geoff Vince, Cleveland Clinic’s executive director of Global Innovations and chair of the Lerner Research Institute Biomedical Engineering Department, during an announcement of the partnership at the Radiological Society of North America’s 2023 Annual Meeting in November. “When you see what Canon has achieved and what Cleveland Clinic has done over the past 100 years, the synergy is just natural. I think what is even more exciting is what we can do together in the future.”
The center will be part of the Cleveland Innovation District, a $500 million-plus private-public partnership between the state of Ohio, JobsOhio (the state’s private economic development corporation) and Cleveland’s healthcare and higher education institutions to accelerate research, create jobs and educate the workforce of the future.
A Focus on Osteoarthritis
The Arthritis Foundation named Cleveland Clinic as the future home for its Osteoarthritis Imaging Center (OIC), which aims to become the country’s largest repository for imaging data from post-traumatic osteoarthritis clinical trials and therapies. The OIC will play a critical role in improving care for patients with osteoarthritis, which is the most common form of arthritis, affecting more than 32.5 million people in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The OIC will coordinate imaging for all future multicenter osteoarthritis clinical trials in the U.S. that are run through the foundation’s Osteoarthritis Clinical Trial Network. Images from multiple modalities, including MRI, computed tomography and radiography, will be sent to the OIC for interpretation and analysis. Researchers and physicians can reference them in a central location for future studies and patient care.
“By establishing a large, central hub, we can provide the support needed to collect the ‘big data’ in a standardized manner that researchers need to solve problems and develop new treatments,” says Xiaojuan Li, staff in the Lerner Research Institute Department of Biomedical Engineering and director of the Program of Advanced Musculoskeletal Imaging at Cleveland Clinic. “The OIC is designed to provide core services for institutions conducting clinical trials that otherwise might need to be subcontracted out at a higher expense.”
During phase 1 of the $2.5 million grant from the Arthritis Foundation, researchers at Cleveland Clinic will build the infrastructure for gathering and archiving images from sites around the country