MINNEAPOLIS, July 31, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Flywheel, the research informatics company, announces the deployment of its medical imaging research platform at Columbia University on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The Flywheel platform has been used by the Columbia neuroscience and biomedical imaging community and their internal and external collaborators at Columbia's Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute since June 2017. With rapid user adoption and increased demands for large-scale data management and computation, Columbia has expanded the Flywheel program and migrated to Google Cloud.

Developed at the direction of Dr. John Thomas Vaughan, Director of the Columbia Magnetic Resonance Research Center and Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Radiology, and Applied Physics and Math and a principal investigator at Columbia's Zuckerman Institute, the Flywheel platform is science and industry's first fully integrated cloud-based MRI research center. The launch at the Zuckerman Institute is the first node of a cloud-based Columbia MR Research Center (CMRRC), which will connect the Institute, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, Columbia's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and external collaborators in greater New York and around the world.

Columbia's Zuckerman Institute has contracted Flywheel to facilitate the efficient, GCP-based data acquisition, archiving, operations and connectivity with other Center laboratories and collaborators. Flywheel provides a complete data management solution to meet the challenges of large, multi-modal imaging data sets as required by multi-center studies and machine learning based research. Flywheel on the Google Cloud Platform will meet the CMRRC data management requirements for unlimited, on-demand computational power and data storage. "Flywheel, together with the GCP are the nervous system of our Center," said Dr. Vaughan, "providing the innervation for the many coordinated functions of a modern, distributed laboratory potentially spanning the world. Leveraging the power of the cloud is obvious and central to the future of scientific investigation. We are fortunate to have Flywheel and GCP working with us at the Zuckerman Institute, connecting our Center across Columbia's campuses as well as extend it to our collaborators around the world."

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