Cancer screening with full-body MRI scans and a seminar on the field of radiology | Rajpaul Attariwala, M.D., Ph.D. (#61 rebroadcast)

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
Welcome to another special episode of The Drive. For this week's episode, we're going to rebroadcast my conversation with Raj Attariwala, which was released back in July 2019 Raj is a dual board certified radiologist and nuclear medicine physician boarded in both Canada and the United States. He's the co-founder of Pranuvo and the medical director at AIM Medical Imaging.
Over the past decade, he has been effectively creating a new way of doing MRI by fine tuning the hardware and building unique software to create a completely revolutionary product and process by which to look at the body using the technology of magnetic resonance. While I think this is a bit of a technical episode, I also think it's one that anybody who's ever had an X-ray, a CT scan, an ultrasound or an MRI in their life needs to listen to. You can divide this episode sort of into two halves as follows. The first half is the history of radiology. So we start with talking about what an X-ray is, how it works, what the radiation does and doesn't mean, how a CT scan became an evolution of that, ultrasounds, PET scanners, nuclear medicine scans, and all of these things. We've done this in the way that is really geared towards you, the patient. I think we do a pretty good job of always bringing it back to language that makes sense, and we don't get terribly lost in the physics of these intricate machines. The second half of the episode is a real deep dive around cancer screening and the use of a particular type of MRI technology that Raj has played an enormous role in developing. What I enjoy about this episode and why I think it's an important rebroadcast is my attention and interest in cancer screening has only grown deeper in the last four years since this episode was originally released. And I still find myself having discussions with patients on a nearly weekly basis about the importance of MRI for screening and its limitations. So without further delay, please enjoy or re-enjoy my conversation with Raj Attariwala.
Hey Raj, thanks for carving some time out today in the middle of your busy day. I've probably done what no one else has done before, which is shut down this clinic, huh?

**Rajpaul Attariwala** (3:01)
No, it's fantastic to see you again and to be here. It's a pleasure as always.

**Peter Attia** (3:05)
What's the deal with Vancouver and Uber? I got off the plane this morning and tried to get an Uber to come here, and apparently there's no Uber in Vancouver.

**Rajpaul Attariwala** (3:15)
It's stunning. Everybody complains, we all complain, but I don't know, somebody, somewhere is not allowing it.
It was amazing, I was in India, and you can get Uber in India.

**Peter Attia** (3:26)
Yeah, and it's not a Canadian thing because I Ubered in Toronto.

**Rajpaul Attariwala** (3:29)
Toronto, Calgary, almost all the country, just Vancouver.

**Peter Attia** (3:32)
Very well. Well, I'll reserve my editorial comments for myself. Well, I've been looking forward to this for a long time, Raj, we've known each other for about four years. I think we were introduced through a mutual acquaintance who's a good friend of mine and has become very interested in your technology.
And I'm not even sure if you remember the context, but the context was basically this person reaching out to me to say, hey, there's this really fancy MRI scanner up in Vancouver.
Can you go check it out for me?
And at the time, I was focusing a lot on different technologies that might be able to aid in the detection of atherosclerosis. And he may have misunderstood what I was interested in, but it was sort of pitched to me through that lens. You and I hopped on a call. I still remember where I was sitting actually in my office at the time. It was probably, yeah, it was in January. By the end of that call, I was really interested. And you said, look, I mean, I think you should just come up to Vancouver, get scanned, and let's spend a day discussing it. And the rest is history. So, you know, what I wanted to do today was obviously talk a lot about AIM, which is the, well, I guess it's the name, is that the name of the company? Or is that?