Digital image analysis is no longer a “nice to have” in precision medicine - it’s foundational. Our latest Digital Research Skills Network (DRSN) session at WIMR focused on QuPath, an open-source platform for bioimage analysis, led by Elizabeth Dunn from the University of Sydney and The Westmead Institute for Medical Research. In this workshop, we explored how QuPath can be used to analyse multiplex fluorescence whole slide images.

Precision medicine won’t scale without precision data sharing. A recent review in Computers in Biology and Medicine explores one of the biggest bottlenecks in genomic medicine: how whole genome sequencing data is actually shared in clinical practice.

The key insight? Research-grade data sharing is not the same as clinical-grade data sharing.

Some research feels incremental - and then there is the kind that quietly redraws the map. At the Westmead Health Precinct and University of Sydney (Westmead Applied Research Centre), a truly multidisciplinary team is working across boundaries that do not often meet in the same room - radiation oncologists, cardiac electrophysiologists, cardiologists, radiation therapists, engineers and basic scientists - united by a single question: How can we better treat patients with medically refractory, life-threatening arrhythmias? Out Westmead Cell Imaging Facility, led by Hui Zhang and with Specialist Hong Yu, have supported this work with our Stellaris 5 Confocal Microscope.

This image stops you for a moment. What you’re looking at is a whole-mount histological section of an ovine left ventricle with chronic scar. It is part of a project led by Anugrah Nair, supervised by Dr Poornima Balaji at Westmead Health Precinct and University of Sydney (Westmead Applied Research Centre), investigating experimental and commercially available catheter ablation energy modalities and how effectively they treat chronic ventricular scar. Out Westmead Cell Imaging Facility, led by Hui Zhang and Specialist Hong Yu have supported this with our Olympus VS200 Slide Scanner.

The Westmead Institute for Medical Research is proud to currently be participating in the #InternationalFreezerChallenge - and the results speak for themselves. By adjusting the set-point temperature of 12 ultra-low temperature (-80°C) freezers, we’ve achieved:
• 96 kWh of electricity saved every day
• That’s roughly the daily energy use of ~6 average Australian households
• ~35 MWh saved each year