September 2003


Northern medical school looks to ORION to make partnership work

By their very nature, the Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM) and ORION were made for each other.

NOSM - a partnership between Laurentian University in Sudbury and Lakehead University in Thunder Bay – will serve an area the size of France. While the main campuses will be in Thunder Bay and Sudbury, NOSM will have multiple teaching and research sites in both large and small communities across Northern Ontario, making connectivity over the ORION network a critical element in the project’s success.

NOSM will rely on some of the most advanced communications technologies to bridge the distances and maximize the sharing of research and education resources.

"The Northern Ontario School of Medicine will train and help retain doctors in the North, ensuring that the long-term health care needs of residents are met.

Using the latest in e-learning technology through the Ontario Research and Innovation Optical Network, NOSM will also open the door to new opportunities in medical research, development and education," said Greater Sudbury Mayor Jim Gordon.

"This exciting initiative will have a positive and powerful impact on the economic health of Northern Ontario," he said.

ORION's ability to effortlessly transmit multiple streams of massive amounts of data between NOSM partners is key to overcoming the great distances separating them.

For example, ORION will make it possible for simultaneous, real-time, two-way video communication between students and classrooms in Sudbury, Thunder Bay and other communities.

Collaborative research in biomedical, clinical, public health, population health, epidemiological, psychological and social sciences, health services, and educational research will also be possible, including remote access to Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) facilities and exploring virtual reality environments using CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) - a highly useful tool for visualization and was specifically developed to encourage more of the scientific community to use virtual reality in learning and research applications. Virtual reality is the wide-field presentation of computer generated multi-sensory information, which tracks a user in real time.

"The sky's the limit," says NOSM spokesperson Mick Lowe. "ORION will give us more than the ability to make this pioneer institutional partnership work - it will help NOMS to flourish."

With ORION’s high speed data pipeline, faculty will have the ability to conduct research between the Laurentian and Lakehead sites using Laurentian’s CAVE to access Giant, Lakehead’s SGI Origin 2000 supercomputer, explore biomedical models and run simulations.

Considerations are also being given to a project where ORION will enable Giant to tie into the Sudbury hospital’s MRI facilities for research purposes.


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