Over July 14-16, AIM’s Medical Director Dr. Raj Attariwala was invited to take part in NIST’s Workshop on Standards for Quantitative MRI at NIST’s headquarters in Boulder, CO.
NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), which was founded in 1901, is one of the oldest physical science labs in the United States. NIST supports the research and development of many important scientific pursuits, from nanoscale devices to earthquake-resistant skyscrapers to global communications networks.
As stated on the NIST website, the Workshop on Standards for Quantitative MRI “…[brought] together key players and groups working on standards for MRI to accomplish the following goals: increased conversation amongst the existing efforts, harmonization of future efforts, and adoption of the standards efforts by the vendors.” The last time NIST sponsored a Standards for Quantitative MRI workshop was 2006, before AIM was even in existence!
AIM Medical Imaging was one of only three Canadian participants involved in the workshop of MRI experts from around the globe. Dr. Attariwala was invited specifically to present a seminar on Diffusion MRI. Dr. 
Attariwala’s paper Whole Body MRI: Improved Lesion Detection and Characterization With Diffusion Weighted Techniques, published in the Journal of MRI in August 2013, established AIM Medical Imaging as an international leader in diffusion imaging.
Dr. Attariwala will collaborate with NIST on an ongoing basis, sharing his expertise in diffusion MRI and helping to set the benchmark for MRI diagnostics worldwide. “I am thrilled to participate with these world class doctors and physicists on setting the standards upon which the new field of body MRI diffusion will advance,” he says.