Partnership Uses Crowdsource Data to Advance Cancer Research

Qt, Quantitative Imaging Systems and KDAB have joined forces to help tackle cancer research, reports the Business Finland news agency Finnfacts. The partnership includes a crowdsourcing project, ‘The Coloring Book of Life’.

The Qt company owned by the Qt Group headquartered in Espoo, Finland, develops and delivers the Qt development framework under commercial and open source licenses, enabling a single software code across all operating systems, platforms and screen types. Quantitative Imaging Systems (Qi) is a biotechnology company specialising in cancer research and treatment, and The KDAB Group (KDAB) is a global software consultancy for Qt, C++ and OpenGL.

Through the partnership, the trio has built imaging software to help researchers gain a thorough understanding of the progression of cancer on a cellular level, using Qt’s cross-platform development framework.

The team has also launched the nanoQuill project, a crowdsourced colouring book and mobile app for annotating cancer research data. The idea for the book dates back to 2015, when a research group developed an outreach programme to provide the general public with a way to assist in cancer research by colouring in features of complex cell images. The researchers hoped to enable crowdsourced assistance to identify patterns in cells that take much longer for computer systems to identify.

“The research that Qi is conducting truly is ground-breaking, but the scope of it is too massive for just one organisation to manage,” said Juha Varelius, CEO, Qt Group. “With our user interface capabilities and KDAB’s unmatched technology expertise, Qi is able to advance its research without being impeded by technological restraints. Furthermore, with the nanoQuill coloring book project, Qi is able to leverage an entire global community to exponentially accelerate the world-changing contributions it’s making towards solving cancer.”