Flywheel’s Origins
Early days. Dr. Brian Wandell, Director of the Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging at Stanford University, recognized a number of years ago that the growth and complexity of research data sets posed a challenge: labs needed a better way to carry out advanced medical imaging research.
In response to this need, Wandell partnered with his colleague, Gunnar Schaefer, to develop a system that captures images from MRI scanners, organizes and curates the images into a database, and provides users with a web interface for viewing and sharing the data. The result was so successful that other collaborators leaving Stanford wanted to take the system with them. Wandell and Schaefer knew they had something that could fill a real need, and help accelerate imaging research and collaboration worldwide.
In 2015 Wandell and Schaefer partnered with Minnesota-based Invenshure to create a product from the idea born at Stanford. Since then, Flywheel has grown into a comprehensive solution for life sciences, clinical research, imaging research, and artificial intelligence (AI) developers to manage their research workflows.
In 2021, after just over five years on the market, Flywheel expanded its capabilities and feature sets with the acquisition of Radiologics, creating a single biomedical research platform that can connect any organization or data set across academia, life sciences, clinical, and medical AI. Today, the Flywheel platform includes Flywheel Enterprise, our flagship imaging research data platform; Flywheel Data Exchange, a catalog of curated datasets; and Flywheel Discovery, a cohort discovery tool.
Flywheel’s unparalleled end-to-end research workflow solutions are opening new possibilities for users around world.
Flywheel’s Future
As healthcare evolves to incorporate more data-driven and AI-assisted care, researchers’ needs for efficiently accessing and managing complex data will only grow. Flywheel is proud to play a part in accelerating discoveries that are changing the way healthcare is delivered to patients around the world.
