Her research program is focused on medical image and digital pathology analysis, particularly on applications of machine learning for segmentation, diagnosis, and prediction/prognosis. In 2006 she co-founded Pathcore, a software company developing complete workflow solutions for digital pathology.
Dr Martel is an active member of the medical image analysis community and is a fellow of the MICCAI Society which represents engineers and computer scientists working in this field. She has served as a board member of MICCAI and is on the editorial board of the journal Medical Image Analysis.