Case Study: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation democratizes global pediatric brain imaging with Flywheel

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s UNITY Project Democratizes Brain Imaging Research Around the Globe

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s UNITY (Ultra‑Low Neuroimaging In The Young) project needed to democratize pediatric brain imaging across high‑ and low‑middle‑income sites, but faced challenges in enabling non‑expert teams to collect, process, and share MRI data consistently and securely. To scale equitable data collection, enforce common workflows and provenance, and build local computing and analysis capacity, UNITY selected Flywheel as its cloud‑based image curation and analysis platform.

Flywheel provided a centralized hub for data ingestion, management, computation and algorithm development (including containerized Flywheel Gears), enabling web‑based QC, automated DICOM→NIfTI conversion, and reproducible pipelines across sites. The results: 48 researchers on 2 Flywheel instances across 12 LMIC/HIC sites, 5,000+ sessions uploaded in 1.5 years, 110K+ algorithms run, 9 gears deployed and 25+ machines in the enterprise—faster, higher‑quality processing, harmonized outputs for cross‑site comparison, and at least one local team publishing results using Flywheel.

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Sean Deoni

Senior Program Officer