Why Canada’s health Innovation bottleneck is adoption, not invention and how the Waterloo Region’s health-technology ecosystem is fixing innovation - https://t.co/SeTVdxg5yH @UWaterloo
The @CHEO Research Institute’s world-first pediatric AI algorithm, ThinkRare, will soon be used in other pediatric centres across Canada – marking one of the first national deployments of a real-time, clinically embedded AI tool in pediatric care. - https://t.co/1Wyn1Lckbu
With support from @OBIOscience, @HamHealthSci McMaster Children’s Hospital has a new tool, the Trexo Plus, designed by Mississauga-based Trexo Robotics, to support patients needing pediatric rehabilitation. https://t.co/3qG9bX8DJS
We are pleased to welcome Pathways BC to the Digital Health Canada membership community. Pathways is a trusted online directory of healthcare providers, services, and clinical resources that supports clinicians in British Columbia. Learn more at https://t.co/mlkeD3HPnE
We are delighted to welcome DCM to the Digital Health Canada membership community. DCM is dedicated to improving critical healthcare communications and operations. Learn more about them at https://t.co/AGXn9Yu08J
Over the past year, there’s been a surge of excitement around agentic AI — systems that don’t just answer questions, but can act: reading instructions, running code, designing pipelines, and making decisions.
In biomedicine, this raises a provocative question:
💡 Could the next member of your ML team be an AI agent?
The honest answer — not yet.
Today, we share BioML-bench, a new open benchmark to measure how far today’s agents are from this vision, and what it will take to get there.
📄 Paper : https://t.co/MI6Wxq3CWK
💻 Code: https://t.co/yIG7JIOKjm
Why this matters
Biomedical discovery doesn’t happen in a single step.
It’s messy, iterative, and deeply interdisciplinary: cleaning data, choosing models, validating results, integrating diverse domains like genomics, imaging, and clinical records.
Existing evaluations — mostly Q&A or coding challenges — don’t capture this complexity.
We needed a testbed that reflects the real work of biomedical ML.
What we built
BioML-bench is a suite of 24 real biomedical ML tasks where agents must:
--Parse nuanced task descriptions
--Build and train models end-to-end
--Compete against human leaderboards populated by domain experts
It’s the first benchmark designed to ask: Can an agent truly operate like a biomedical data scientist?
What we learned
Our experiments with four different agents — from general-purpose systems to biomedical specialists — reveal a sobering truth:
--Current agents operate at ~35% of human expert performance.
--Domain specialization alone isn’t enough. Success comes from flexible, creative strategies, not rigid pipelines.
--Even on imaging tasks, deep learning was underutilized, highlighting a gap between human and agent intuition.
Looking ahead
The promise of agentic AI isn’t to replace human scientists — it’s to amplify them.
Imagine a future where an agent can set up a first-pass analysis overnight, freeing a scientist to focus on questions, not debugging scripts.
We’re not there yet. But with BioML-bench, we now have a shared yardstick to track progress, spark innovation, and bring accountability to this emerging field.
Grateful to our amazing team — led by @Henrymiller2012 , with contributions from Matthew Greenig, Benjamin Tenmann, and support from @SciMac.
This work is a small but necessary step toward a future where AI becomes a true partner in biomedical discovery. 🌱
#AI #Biomedicine #Agents #MachineLearning #BioML
Call For Papers 📣 JMIR Biomedical Engineering invites submissions for a theme issue on AI Applications in Biomedical Engineering
Learn More: https://t.co/M9B15MA7W5
Editor-in-Chief: @Prof_Dr_S_Rizvi
The Ontario government has introduced the Health Innovation Pathway, a new system aimed at streamlining the review and adoption of healthtech solutions. https://t.co/UUGOCQbNv0
We are pleased to welcome @SEHealth_SEHC to the Digital Health Canada membership community! SE Health is a leading social enterprise and one of the largest diversified home health organizations in Canada. Learn more at https://t.co/z6Na51vRtk
@VCHhealthcare's new Break Wave Lithotripsy procedure uses low-intensity sound waves to break up kidney stones. Anesthesia is not required for this 30-minute trial procedure and patients can drive themselves to and from the hospital. https://t.co/OfYEIQDcsb
@providence_care's new Centre for Digital Health Research (CDHR) will serve as a regional hub for collaboration, research and innovation at the intersection of healthcare and digital technology. https://t.co/kWOadxp0RL
Establish the right conditions for the successful implementation of AI-driven solutions with the guidance of the experts interviewed in 📔 Setting the Winning Conditions for AI-powered Healthcare (the latest CHIEF Executive Forum initiative) - https://t.co/DXvQJdw8Vd