Toronto's SickKids announces first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence position

Dr. Anna Goldenberg, senior scientist in genetics and genome biology at SickKids, poses at the Peter Gilgan Centre for Research and Learning in Toronto. Inside the pediatric intensive care unit at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, an infant recovering from open-heart surgery is barely visible through the forest of whizzing and beeping machines that monitor his every vital sign. In the old days, those vital signs – a baby's heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen levels and other signals – would have flashed across a screen and then been lost to posterity. But in 2013, SickKids began collecting and storing the data that emanate from patients in their 42 intensive-care beds. The unit now has more than two trillion data points in its virtual vault, far more than a mere mortal could make sense of.