Montreal Heart Institute (MHI) is a highly-specialized fully integrated academic hospital and leading research center with the expertise and facilities to conduct early phase clinical research.
This includes Phase I, first-in-human and proof-of-concept studies, both in healthy volunteers and patients.

Services
• Drug studies (including new chemical entities and natural health products), diagnostics and medical devices;
• Access to specific patient populations such as patients with cardiovascular or metabolic diseases;
• 20-bed short-stay unit with specialized medical and nursing staff and 24/7 care including emergencies;
• Laboratory and central imaging services: echocardiography, ultrasound, Cardiac Magnetic Resonance (CMR) and CT scans;
• Supervision and operational services: central management, monitoring, data management, statistical analysis and reporting that meet regulatory standards and Good Clinical Practice (GCP).

The Montreal Heart Institute’s Core Laboratories are internationally recognized in image acquisition, central readings and data analysis. The MHI Core Laboratories acts as a central resource for technique development, standardization and dissemination (training regarding specific techniques), quality assurance for image acquisition, as well as handling and central analysis of imaging data collected in all imaging sites of our worldwide network.

The MHI Core Laboratories use cutting edge imaging solutions and have dedicated staff bringing years of experience in the interpretation of medical images. The MHI Core Laboratories work under good clinical practices and have extensive written and validated standard operating procedures (including independent image assessments) ensuring consistency and reproducibility of measurements, and compliance to protocols and regulations.

Each of the MHI's central laboratories is headed by an experienced cardiologist, radiologist or nuclear medicine specialist. The services offered include the following:
• Echocardiography
• Cardiovascular nuclear medicine (PET and SPECT)
• Electrocardiography (ECG) + Holter
• Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS)
• Quantitative Coronary Angiography (QCA)
• Coronary computed tomography angiogram (Coronary CTA)
• Carotid Intima-Media Thickness (cIMT)
• Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)
• Optical Coherence Tomograpy (OCT)
• Cardiovascular Biomarkers
• Pharmacogenomics

CAIN
The CAIN network is a research medical image transfer infrastructure supported by the Montreal Heart Institute Research Centre.
The CAIN network is used in multi-center research projects to enable the easy, secure and confidential transfer of medical imaging data from centers located around the world. The data is de-identified by the participating center before being securely transferred to the CAIN servers and then sent to the experts who will analyze the images.
Our central laboratories, described in the previous section, have access to images received on the CAIN network directly from the MHI research center. These images can also be redistributed to other CAIN partner institutions.

Origin of the CAIN network

The network was created to support the Canadian Atherosclerosis Imaging Network (CAIN), a pan-Canadian atherosclerosis imaging network funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). This outstanding research network conducted several studies and sub-studies using the CAIN computer network, and gave it its name.
The Medical Imaging Trial Network of Canada (MITNEC) is a national research network that was created at the MHI. This national network has involved 14 Canadian universities.
Since 2010, over 30,000 examinations in more than 60 research projects have been transferred. Among others, the CarChem, COLPEF, EVOLVE, HiRO-HCM and MITNEC C6 projects are currently using CAIN to transfer and store their exams.

MITNEC
A national research network, MITNEC (Medical Imaging Trial NEtwork of Canada) was created at the MHI to address the objectives of moving innovations in medical imaging toward their broad application in clinical research and facilitating the uptake of research outcomes into clinical practice and improved patient care.
It is truly national in scope with participation from 14 universities located in 4 provinces across Canada (the 5 above plus the University of British Columbia, Queens Elizabeth II Health Science Center, Montreal Neurological Institute, Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre, Lawson Health Research Institute, Cross Cancer Institute, Université Laval, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Sherbrooke, McMaster University).
Again, the MHICC plays the role of the sole coordinating centre and repository for this network.