University of Waterloo partners to create a Synthetic Data Network

The University of Waterloo is developing a Synthetic Data Network (SDN) as part of a new cross-Canada consortium with institutions from Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick.

“Canada’s health-care system produces an immense amount of data with the potential to drive better decisions and better outcomes,” said Dr. Helen Chen from the School of Public Health Sciences. “However, vital privacy requirements can make it difficult to share and use person-level data at scale. This limits collaboration and leaves important opportunities for discovery untapped.”

To address the issue, the consortium’s project will leverage synthetic data – computer-generated data that highly resemble statistical characteristics of the real patient data but contains no information that can be traced back to a specific person. “Synthetic data preserves the richness of variables while enhancing privacy protection,” Chen said.

The project will first focus on lung cancers using datasets from the McGill University Health Centre and the Princess Margaret University Health Network. The team will use the datasets to better understand patient populations, care pathways, treatment patterns and health-care resource use. They will then test whether the approach can be scaled up for broader use.

“Waterloo’s involvement in the Synthetic Data Network provides a strategic opportunity to contribute both the technical architecture and expertise and governance leadership to an emerging national health-data infrastructure,” Chen said.

The consortium was one of 14 groups nationally that received inaugural funding from the Digital Health Innovation Fund (DHIF), a new national program led by the Terry Fox Research Institute’s Digital Health and Discovery Platform. The DHIF program provides $900,000 in funding to the SDN partners, which will contribute $3.6M to establish the network.

The SDN includes institutions such as the McGill University Health Centre, the University Health Network, the University of New Brunswick, the Canadian Personalized Healthcare Innovation Network, ZS Associates and MDClone Canada.

The University of Waterloo and the SDN are also collaborating with the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) and the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) on advancing synthetic data generation methods to support health system innovation while protecting privacy. The University of Waterloo Investigators include Drs. Chen (Health), Anita Layton (Math), Sun Sun (NRC) and their research group. 

“To realize the full benefits of AI in health care, we need approaches that enable organizations to work together without exposing sensitive information,” Chen said. “Synthetic data creates new opportunities for collaboration, helping researchers develop and test AI solutions that can be trusted and adopted across the health system.”