By Mélisande Rouger
At ECR2024, we spoke with Samuel Oliveira, CEO and Founder of Everything MRI, a company that aims to spread knowledge about MRI among the radiographers’ community.
What is Everything MRI?
We’re a radiographers’ company that provides free information through our podcasts and contributions on social media. Two of the main issues with MRI are safety and insufficient access to education, either because of a lack of financial means or geographical distance from the courses. We tackle these topics and many others with our free content and engaging discussions.
How hard is it for radiographers to get proper training in MRI?
Medical imaging departments increasingly face staff shortages. That means managers cannot send all their staff to a specific course at the same time. They usually only send one or two persons. On top of that, training is extremely expensive for self-pay attendance.
With Everything MRI, we’re trying to get the greatest names in the world of MRI safety and other topics to provide that education for these people who can’t access it otherwise, by means of free worldwide, online events. We also provide extensive content that we produce on a weekly basis.
Incidents on MRI scanners still occur too often. Do you think radiographers need more safety training?
When it comes to MRI training, there are some missing links, especially around safety. There’s a lack of mandatory regulation, that’s why you see incidents all the time in the news. We have guidelines, but nothing mandatory, so most hospitals are doing what they can.
Every radiographer receives proper safety training, but these courses are quite basic. So we approached universities to help them improve their syllabus and the safety topics they are giving through VR systems. We try to provide more awareness. Safety is a big need out there and we want to improve it from the ground up – from students to CEOs.
We want to provide free education. We have a few free webinars this year with world-renowned MRI safety experts such as Dr. Emanuel Kanal, Dr. Frank Shellock, Tobias Gilk, Doug Boyd, Barbara Nugent and William Faulkner; AI experts like Jan Beger, Dr Christina Malamateniou and Dr Amrita Kumar just to mention a few. We also have patient experience experts like Dr. Darren Hudson, Ruth Evans MBE and more.
The first of these free, worldwide online events will be held on April 15th at 5pm BST. We will provide our community with an engaging and eye-opening AI & innovations discussion with some of the best minds in the space.
How did you create the company?
I created the company a year ago of the perceived idea that we are doing this MRI safety thing completely wrong. Julien Greggio joined two or three months later. He was creating a lot of content on YouTube, and so when he approached me I thought: ‘This is perfect, let’s join forces and do this together!’ We renamed his YouTube channel to Everything MRI.
Most of the content on YouTube is Julien’s hard work, and it’s amazing quality which I am proud of being able to provide to our audience. We work on Everything MRI on our free time i.e. weekends and late nights. We do the podcasts together as pretty much everything else. I always wanted to have such a podcast about MRI, and invite those people with who we resonate the most and can learn a lot from.
How long does the podcast last and what topics did you cover?
It usually lasts between 45 and 50 minutes. We have already recorded six or seven episodes. We release one episode per month and want to increase that to two episodes a month in the upcoming year.
We’ve tackled cardiac MRI, functional MRI, and spectroscopy. We also had an episode about MRI applications, and one about elite football players. In the next months we will have patient experience, high field magnets and safety as our main topics, with big names coming to speak to the community. So, it’s really about everything MRI.
Our latest episode was recorded with arguably one of the best independent MRI application specialists in the UK, Stephen Mhiribidi. This episode is coming out by the end of this month, so watch out!
What has been the response so far?
Very good! In the last 30 days, we had 6K impressions just on Spotify. There is a huge cohort of people watching from the US, Germany, UK and India. We have around 100 countries watching into our podcast across YouTube, Spotify, Amazon, Apple and Google.
Julien and I are both Mediterranean, so we also have a good audience there. Italy is the fifth biggest viewer because Julien pushes it a little and Portugal comes in eighth.
Our content will soon be available in different languages, but I can’t speak much about it yet. For now, we started with English only.
Eventually we want to involve everyone: not just radiographers, but also radiologists, nurses, technicians, cardiologists, and other specialists that use MRI, not forgetting patients.
What are the future trends in your field?
Remote scanning is already here in a lot of countries. I’m a huge advocate for that. VR, AI, and holographic technologies will play a major role in everything we do in the future.
I had a very interesting an insightful conversation about that with GE Healthcare, Fujifilm and Philips at ECR 2024, and that’s the way to go – that’s going to be the future.
For Everything MRI, we have something massive coming in Q4 that will change the way we approach Cardiac MRI education worldwide, but that’s all I can say at the moment.
Samuel Oliveira is the Founder and CEO of Everything MRI, as well as the Founder and Chair of the London MRI leads group. He also works as a Lead MRI Superintendent at HCA healthcare in London. He is responsible for MRI safety & training as MRSO, and oversees scanners at three facilities.
