University of Waterloo Co-op Students Propel Innovative Research at SickKids with Robotics and AI

Leveraging co-op opportunities, Waterloo students have been making a huge impact across various industries including business, technology and health.

Many of these breakthroughs occur at the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), Canada’s largest single hospital research institute, and one of Waterloo’s top co-op employers.

From designing image detection tools to developing 3D neurovascular prototypes and building surgical robot simulators, producing disruptive technologies is at the core of what our students do in advancing the future of health care in Canada.

Earlier this year, two co-op students disrupted the boundaries of health by applying AI to the genetic studies of cerebral palsy at SickKids, but there are many more success stories from Waterloo’s co-op placements in research labs, as well as clinical and corporate departments across the institution.

‘We like to have them back multiple times’

Senior leaders at SickKids explain that whether Waterloo students come from engineering, science or math, they seem to have a propensity to figure it out; they have ideas about how to solve the problem.

“Waterloo students have been able to help make strong impacts on our research projects by rapidly developing prototypes or conducting experiments,” says Dr. Thomas Looi of the Wilfred and Joyce Posluns Centre for Image Guided Innovation and Therapeutic Intervention at SickKids.

“For example, we were able to develop 3D printing techniques that a student had learned in a prior term and apply them to our work here, which enables us to create a library of neurovascular models. In another case, a student helped to build a surgical robot simulator that has served as a foundation for future undergraduate and graduate projects.”

Waterloo’s fusion of work-integrated learning, entrepreneurial rigor and impact-driven research has gone beyond traditional higher education approaches to deliver future-ready talent with the expertise to develop solutions to real-world problems.

Dr. Richard Wintle has hired approximately 100 co-op students during his time at SickKids, and shares that he typically has two co-op students working in the centre at any given time.

“Waterloo students who come here tend to bring to us a certain degree of energy and enthusiasm … and we like to have them back multiple times,” Wintle says.

Students in the genome centre are tasked with analyzing the human genome to expand understanding of how alterations in genes may arise newly in a person or might be inherited from one of their parents, and how these changes can impact certain diseases or disorders.

Finding solutions for complex tasks

Wayne Lee (BASc ’04), alum of Waterloo’s Systems Design Engineering program, has welcomed the skills and enthusiasm co-op students bring to their work at SickKids.

“What I really appreciate about Waterloo co-op students is that they are prepared and ready for work. Each work term, we get students who are highly committed, engaged and able to jump right into complex projects and make meaningful progress in just 16 weeks,” Lee says.

He recalls a student, who during their co-op term, worked on a segmentation algorithm to rapidly define the boundaries of organs within multiple MRI images. “Although the human eye is really good at outlining an organ, it is extremely time-consuming to do it digitally across hundreds of images,” he explains. “A computer is fast, but loses accuracy where organs touch each other. The student experimented with a mixture of image processing and human input and created a human-assisted algorithm with the speed of a computer, but the accuracy of a human.”

Work on the algorithm continued after the student completed their work term.  Urologists and AI scientists then used it to create a program that rapidly measured and assessed kidney function to help determine whether more invasive tests were needed. The human-assisted algorithm also created enough training data to become fully automated using an AI model.

“It’s nice when we see the students reflect a little bit on the things that they’ve learned in school already and apply them to the new situation that they’re in,” Wintle adds. “I think most of our students appreciate that they’re at an institution that has a lot of reputation, has a very high-powered research institute with a lot of very smart people in it, and they lend tremendously to the work.”

Looi also remembers Ella Walsh (BASc ’24), a recent graduate who worked on two projects across two co-op terms last year: pressure sensing for clubfoot and a DaVinci robot simulator for fetal surgery.

“It was an amazing opportunity to lead both of these projects during my eight-month work terms in 2023, collaborating with fellow students, engineers in other research groups, surgeons and other clinical stakeholders,” Walsh shares. “I worked in-clinic with a surgeon and developed a pressure sensor that can detect children’s feet in their foot braces. We have since spun out of the hospital to create a company called OrthoFlexion.”

The second project was a 3D simulator based on the DaVinci Xi robotic surgery system, which she designed and programmed for use by surgeons to practise fetal surgery (spina bifida repair) in a low-risk environment.

Walsh also presented her work as a podium talk at the Hamlyn Symposium for Medical Robotics in London, England in June 2024.

“We have had Waterloo co-op alumni here, literally since the beginning. They’re kind of pervasive within the structure, and I think that’s because we frequently like to try and entice them back after they finish their university degree.” — Wintle

The University of Waterloo has the largest co-op program at a research-intensive university in the world with more than 70 per cent of students gaining up to two years of employment experience during their studies. The talent we develop continues to have a significant economic impact in our region and around the world.

SickKids is part of a network of more than 8,000 employers connected to the University that help students develop work-ready skills and secure meaningful employment after graduating.