Mila announces partnership with Gray Oncology Solutions, a Quebec-based startup optimizing patient flow within cancer centers
Montreal, October 5 2021 – Mila, the Quebec AI Institute, is proud to announce that Gray Oncology Solutions, a Montreal-based startup that optimizes cancer patient treatment logistics, joins its community as a new partner. The announcement follows the closing of Gray’s first financing round ($1.25M) and will support the continued development of their debut product, grayOS. Described as an operating system for cancer centers, grayOS uses operations research (OR) and artificial intelligence to ensure every patient is treated as efficiently and as quickly as possible.
“We have a vision of ensuring that every cancer patient’s treatment is delivered in an optimal fashion, using a data-driven approach,” said André Diamant, co-founder and CEO of Gray. “Medical environments are incredibly complex and once you add the variability that comes with individual patients, it can be challenging to build a model capable of accurately representing the environment. This partnership with Mila will support our efforts in marrying operations research and AI to ultimately improve patient care.”
Gray uses sophisticated OR algorithms interwoven with AI to solve patient scheduling in radiation oncology and medical oncology. For example, the OR algorithms determine where best to fit various tasks given numerous constraints, while the AI algorithms determine the specific length of time required to perform a particular task, thus informing the duration that a resource is needed for.
“We are excited to welcome Gray Oncology Solutions into our research and partners community. Their work to optimize the logistics of how healthcare providers handle patient-flow is promising and we look forward to opportunities to take this technology to the next level, from both a technical and socially responsible perspective,” said Yoshua Bengio, Founder and Scientific Director of Mila.
About Mila
Founded by Professor Yoshua Bengio of the Université de Montréal, Mila is a research institute in artificial intelligence which rallies about 700 researchers specializing in the field of deep learning. Based in Montreal, Mila’s mission is to be a global pole for scientific advances that inspires innovation and the development of AI for the benefit of all. Mila is a non-profit organization recognized globally for its significant contributions to the field of deep learning, particularly in the areas of language modeling, machine translation, object recognition, and generative models.
About Gray Oncology Solutions
Gray Oncology Solutions was founded in 2019 by a pair of Medical Physics PhDs and a trio of Montreal-based professors looking to translate their research into clinical practice. They have a vision of an oncology workflow where each patient’s journey through their cancer treatment is personalized for them, and statistically optimized to provide the best possible clinical outcomes. In pursuit of this vision, they’ve developed resource allocation software focused on optimizing the functional efficiency of oncology clinics (grayOS). Operationally, this translates to the optimization & automation of patient scheduling while explicitly incorporating the complex multi-disciplinary workflow resulting in reduced patient wait-times, higher patient throughput, reduced stress and ultimately, superior patient care.