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Welcome to the Healthy Brain Toolbox. I'm Dr. Ken Sharlin, neurologist, speaker, author, and host for this show. In each episode, I interview influential people whose work impacts how we live and how we think. My guests are leaders in the health and fitness industry, physicians, scientists. Here, you'll find conversations that break down barriers, expand your horizons, and give you the tools you need to protect your health and nourish your aging brain.

Dr. Ken Sharlin: 0:30

Welcome again to the Healthy Brain Toolbox podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Ken Sharlin. Today's guest I'm gonna say a friend of mine, and yet James, we have never actually met in person, despite multiple wonderful conversations. That's the way of the world is these days. I guess. James Hammett is the founder and CEO of Vistim Labs. This technology will blow your mind folks. He is an innovator in multimodal brain imaging, a neuroscientist, entrepreneur, inventor who has dedicated his career to transforming how we detect and monitor neurodegenerative diseases. Folks, if you got a PET scan step aside. Here we come with a background in bridging. Engineering, neuroscience and early stage venture creation. James has founded multiple companies focused on applying advanced sensing and machine learning technologies to real world medical challenges. Again, he is the founder and CEO of Vistim. A company pioneering multimodal. Imaging using EEG based biomarkers, including the novel amyloid, EEG, a non-invasive scalable approach that aims to provide PET scan level diagnostic insights without the cost. And by the way, without the radionuclide tracer, or limited access at least, for those who have limited access to nuclear imaging, this is your solution. But it's gonna be better than that, right? His work is redefining how Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease can be monitored in both clinical and research settings, creating powerful new tools for detection, longitudinal tracking, and therapeutic development. Welcome James to the Healthy Brain Toolbox.

James Hamet: 2:29

Thank you so much, Ken. It's such a pleasure to be here and what an incredible introduction. It is true. We've been friends for such a long time. I really need to make it out to your you knock on woods, especially since we're not even far away. I'm on the west coast of Florida. I could probably sail over.

Dr. Ken Sharlin: 2:43

You can pick me up in your boat. That sounds a lot more pleasant right now than southwest Missouri. It's a beautiful area where I live, but it's a lot nicer in the spring, summer, and earlier part of the fall. James, again, welcome. For listeners who may be meeting you for the first time, give us the short version of your background. Where did your interest in neuroscience and technology begin?

James Hamet: 3:06

it actually didn't come from my parents even though my father's a interventional neuroradiologist. You learn by osmosis. So I definitely was absorbing what I could as a child and looking up to them and wanting to have the same impact on patients' lives. As my parents, my mom's an anesthesiologist, also a physician. But I went to the University of Michigan to study artificial intelligence and electrical engineering, and that's where I started to become friends with some neuroscientists. I already knew the lingo. I was doing pitch competitions and building stuff, and one of these scientists asked me if I have ever had interest in telekinesis. I said, yes. I came up with an idea that we tried at a hackathon and. We were able to do a mind controlled 3D Mickey Mouse, don't tell Disney. And we were able to win the hackathon, which was, very exciting for me as a sophomore in college. That ended up becoming my first venture backed business. And I guess through working with people who are in the disabled community, I learned that most of their conditions stem from undiagnosed, untreated, neuro degeneration. And so I thought maybe there's something better I could do than just telekinesis. As cool as that is, it's not a very practical technology. Especially I would say at scale not everybody is paralyzed, but also most people who are paralyzed, again it's for that undiagnosed un undetected neurodegeneration, which could have been prevented. So after having some success there. I decided to fully dedicate myself to medicine and my first mission was to prevent people from even needing my wheelchair technology in the first place. So I started Vistim Labs and I started looking first at differential diagnosis, which we were doing very well. Schizophrenia, autism, Alzheimer's. These are conditions that don't have very much in common. And yet we did studies on them with the same technology and it worked every time. But we had a breakthrough when I was doing a study in Germany at LMU Munich Hospital. We had patients with PET scans for the first time. And one of the things that we were trying to do is correlate with the PET scan just to see how our diagnostic accuracy might compare to PET. And not only did we find the diagnostic accuracy to be superior to PET. We found some evidence that we may even be able to infer the PET images themselves using EEG, which is a convenient non-radioactive technology. So that's just to share a little bit of the story. It's certainly a longer road with periods of struggle and challenge. But we've managed to make structural brain imaging possible instant brain imaging possible with EEG. And that's a technology that is available now. And it's already installed in some clinics around the US.

Dr. Ken Sharlin: 5:48

That's really exciting. Although, I must say, having, worked with some folks that have ALS telekinesis sounds pretty attractive if you're tragically trapped in your own body.

James Hamet: 5:59

Absolutely. But I'm also hoping that this brain imaging technology we've developed will enable for effective treatment of ALS before any symptoms are present. Anyway the technology for telekinesis is now being done at a broad scale by a variety of companies, not just mine. I'm happy to know that I was able to contribute in that direction and yeah, if you're interested, please look up the work that we did at Neurable.

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Dr. Ken Sharlin: 8:18

I do wanna talk a little bit about some of the earlier companies before we dive into Vistim, and in general, broadly to what lessons you learned from those early ventures, that ultimately shaped your mindset as you approached Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease as well.

James Hamet: 8:37

So many lessons. I would say that one of the biggest lessons that I learned was. I need to think, do I wanna say biggest or most recent? The most recent are the ones at top of mind. The biggest lesson I learned is that if you wanna have, if you have a vision for impact and you want to have that vision, realized it's important to adopt a philosophy of radical accountability. I used to lean very heavily on my team. And I know that's a good thing. In some ways, and I know that there are people out there who have entire careers dedicated towards helping business owners, trust their team more. But there is a certain stage of a company, especially at the very beginning, where you really need to lean on yourself more than others. That's that stage where maybe you don't have the funding to pay for other people to work with you, right? That's also the stage where maybe you don't have the clarity of your communication to be able to accurately describe what your vision is. And so maybe you are working with other people and you could work with them very well, but they might not understand your vision well enough to move in the right direction and the same direction as you. So I would say that for the very early stages. That radical accountability is critical and key. And I, for me it's the definition of success. Without it there, there is failure. Then this is just my personal experience, but what that really means from a scope perspective is getting from zero to one, getting to your first prototype, getting to your first customer, accomplishing your first, whatever it is. I believe that should be done by the person who has that vision, because if you can't cross that first barrier, it's going to be very difficult to equip somebody else to cross that barrier with you and to cross that barrier in the future. So I think it's a burden, but it's the burden on the entrepreneur to pass that zero to one step. And then you have other jobs as well. But that for me was the biggest lesson. And every time I didn't do that, every time, I hired a salesperson to have them do the first sale, or, I hired somebody to build my MVP for me, I always ended up having to do it again myself. So that's where that lesson comes from. But once you can cross that zero to one, then trusting your team, working on that scalability side of things. If it becomes a night and day shift, then you have to focus on not doing it yourself. So it's, yeah, it's a funny situation. But my most recent lesson, I would say is and it's one I pretty much already knew, but always put the customer first, always.

Dr. Ken Sharlin: 11:20

That's great. Development and pitch decks and all those other things that kind of go, with it. But I did eventually learn some of that and I have much more to learn. Of course. But what I'm getting at is if somebody asks me exactly is an entrepreneur and what is really sales that, and it's weird sale in medicine. We use the word sales in sounds or feels icky, but here's where I want to go with it to too many folks. And I'm gonna turn that around 180 degrees and say to me, and what I hear, and this is cliche, I'm certainly not making it up, entrepreneurs are focused on solving a problem. And sales, true sales are about bringing value to people, right? Not just selling them something, but bringing them something of value. So here's my question in that context, we are now in this medical arena. And you're focusing on Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and ALS, was there something about your journey that brought this entrepreneurial spirit of problem solving and bringing value to someone, specifically something that bridged that the someone for you is the person from Alzheimer's with Alzheimer's, the person with Parkinson's, for example.

James Hamet: 12:40

Yeah, that's a good question. Yeah, I guess to rephrase the question is. You, it sounds to me like what type of importance would I give that, and I would say, giving what type of importance would I give to the connection to the patients, the connection to the problem? You said entrepreneurs exist to solve the problem. I agree with you a hundred percent. I think a lot of entrepreneurs first priority number one, this is priority number one. I think that if you are not solving a problem, you are creating a business that has no value. I think that in the context of sales, I've seen some salespeople sell things that frankly, are not useful that do not solve a problem. They generate money. Sure, that's definitely the case. But if you do not create something that solves a problem you're gonna end up with unhappy customers. You're gonna end up with something that doesn't scale. You have to solve a problem if you wanna create something that people can be excited about, that customers can rave about and share with other customers. Probably my favorite answer to this would be a quote from the Dutch, and that quote is that trust arrives by foot and leaves by horse. So if you take some of these shortcuts and sell products that don't work or create products that are maybe cool but aren't useful, you're not going to earn very much trust and you certainly will lose it quickly. I think that currency is a form of trust. It's trust in the physical world, right? I trust that this dollar is worth something and the government won't just print money until it's worth zero. Knock on wood, I hope that doesn't happen. But that's what I think. I think business is trust and if you're not solving a problem, I just don't know how you can effectively earn trust. And so to that, recent thing that I said, put the customer first and to your comment on being a physician and on, on caring so much about your patient on the Alzheimer's angle. For me, I have Parkinson's in my family. I have stroke in my family. I've seen these conditions affect my friends as well as my family, and it's. It is coming from the heart. It's frustrations. And you can see from the journey that I've taken that it's never been about the money and it never should be because then you end up with a business that's not solving a problem. So I always put the patient first and even last night. I was up working until maybe 3:00 AM, when I had an 8:00 AM call just because I got a tip from an IT person who's using our technology at a clinic. He had an idea on how to make it better and it improved the patient's experience. And for me that's so important that I was happy to throw away hours of sleep just to make sure that I could get that update into the product today. And so I emailed him this morning and I said, yeah, guess what? It's done. Great idea. Please keep the feedback coming. I remember closing customers who've said to me. Hey, how are you about taking feedback? Do you mind if I share some ideas? I said, please, I don't want your money. I want your feedback. Tell me how to make it better. Because even if you're using it for free, the feedback you give me is gonna make this product solve so many problems that the money follows. So I think if you focus on money, you're focused on the short term and you won't make it far. But if you focus on the solution, even if there's a delay in the money will follow.

Dr. Ken Sharlin: 15:55

I'm sometimes asked to be on advisory panels, things like that.

James Hamet: 15:58

That would be good for that business to have you.

Dr. Ken Sharlin: 16:01

yeah. And in some respects, and I'm still trying to run all my businesses and all that, so I have to be very selective. But I think, for me is that I have to really feel very passionate about whatever it is a given company. Once my help on I have to really believe in their product. So it certainly echoes what you're saying. So was there some spark then that led to founding Vistim? Was there a particular moment where you realized that EEG might hold the key to say something that you've been missing all along?

James Hamet: 16:33

Yeah, that's a good question. I started with EEG, so for me, it's always been a part of the equation. I've spent many hours thinking about how I can use this technology, what it could be used for, what type of problems it could solve. And I've read many autobiographies actually written, by patients themselves suffering from Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, even schizophrenia. There's a great book called I think it's the Diving Bell and the Butterfly, at least I know that there's a French book called Be Ion, which I've also read about a patient who is bed locked. And they had to type the entire book with a nurse by looking at an alphabet and then blinking when the nurse's finger is pointing at the letter that's next to be typed painful experience, but beautifully described in this autobiography. These became my problem set, these autobiographies. This is the life of the patient. I started having this idea that, of course there's many problems. There are many problems in the world. There's so much suffering. I got this idea that probably the worst form of suffering is the lack of agency. The inability to control your destiny to be a, an active participant in your life. And that has become almost my reason for being it's to solve that problem of lack, of loss of agency. And so that's what led me down this path of using EEG for diagnostics and for telekinetic potentials. I believe that the patient needs to be an active participant in their healthcare journey. I don't think doctors disagree with that. I think doctors want that too. But it can be difficult for the patient to feel that they are involved, and it can be difficult for the doctor to get the patient involved. Patients are not educated in medicine. They're not able to think rationally. In some cases. You get diagnosed with cancer, that's devastating news. How do you even process that piece of information? I've seen it myself where the patient goes into shock and they can't respond to anything that you say to them. They can't even hear it. It's like in the movies when the voice disappears and you just hear the tone, I've seen that. And I wanna be part of that problem in solving it. I wanna be part of making it so that the patient and the doctor are just a dream team. I should point out also, we are an AI company. One of the very strong philosophical stances that we have at our company is that AI does not exist to replace humans. I know that there's a lot of the minority, there's a lot of people who believe AI is purely for replacing humans, and that's part of its job. But I've made sure that our AIs that we're building strictly do not replace humans, especially doctors. They exist to give doctors information that is not possible to have today. Without the use of AI, but the doctor's role is empowered, not replaced. I think that a world where we are trusting AI is more than humans is a world with worse off patient outcomes. Because at the end of the day, outcomes are not actually about numbers and optimized algorithms. Outcomes are about experience. It's that human to human connection not just improving. Who? Who do you choose as your doctor? You choose the person that you trust. That's the most important thing. It comes back to business, and it comes back to trust. Trust in my worldview is everything, and there's nothing in this world with any value that doesn't have trust at its foundation.

Dr. Ken Sharlin: 20:06

And it's touch and go. Of course. I hear people talk about their oncologists and things like that who are there for that journey of the person's cancer, and they'll speak very passionately. But on the other hand, I have a lot of folks who come to see me as a neurologist. They come because I do have the reputation for listening and connecting and getting to know that person as a human being. They'll say, I saw the neurologist for five minutes. They didn't even examine me. They didn't even stay long enough to answer any questions. They said they were gonna send in a prescription, which they did and i'll see you in six months and I don't even know what I'm supposed to do with this medicine or what. It's really ultimately for what it's supposed to do to me, or for me, or anything like that. So we have definitely a big problem, going on in that regard that I hope in some ways. It's solved. I also agree with you fully, I'm deeply involved with AI and it's been such a gift and a life changer. But at no point in time have I ever felt the AI was more than an incredibly brilliant tool to make easier for me and for my patients to bring clarity. I have no problem saying that. Sometimes I'll see very simple cases, if someone comes in, I've got headaches and they're one sided. I have nausea, vomiting, light, and sound sensitivity, that's migraine, and we can talk about why people get migraine and what is migraine and how is migraine treated conventionally and what holistic modalities could be very useful and are still evidence-based. But on the other hand, every once in a while see very complicated cases. And even though I do think through them, I have used AI to check my thinking and to explore maybe avenues I haven't considered and to give structure to my approach. Okay. What's gonna be the next step and the next step. And it's not that I blindly trust that, but I'm like, that's a really good point. I'll integrate that into my, approach or that's makes me feel better.'cause that's what I thought was going on. But no, especially when we tend to. Practice as physicians too often in isolation. I don't have partners to bounce cases off of. It has been incredibly useful in all the other areas, of course, as well.

COMMERCIAL BREAK: 22:20

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Dr. Ken Sharlin: 24:21

Let's dive into Vistim'cause this is the highlight of the interview. And I wanna make sure that the folks who are listening, there are hopefully some clinicians or some maybe hospital administrators and clinic managers are gonna be very interested in this technology. Maybe some sponsors, big pharmaceutical companies planning large scale clinical trials and want to integrate this tool into the trial. Obviously some folks, we're all, I always say we're all patients at one point or another, so I wanna make sure for clinicians and researchers and others who may be new to your work, what exactly is multimodal EEG, and how does it differ from traditional EEG?

James Hamet: 25:02

Yeah, that's a great question. So in working with EEG for such a long time I've been very frustrated with how, frankly useless it is. I've seen so many EEG technologies and it's not for lack of trying, right? EEG's been around for a hundred years. People have been trying many different things. The world currently sits at a place where people use EEG for looking at arbitrary power bans. I hardly think of power bans as having utility in the biological context beyond, potential activation of enzymes, for example, at the 40 hertz frequency in the brain. That was a really cool publication by MIT, if anyone's listening. But I think that the brain is more sophisticated than that. But also more simple. I don't think that the brain operates in these commonly referred to default mode networks and just this pure, radio wave concept. Alright, now I got my little thought out of the way. What I do know is that neurons are part of the brain and they make up the brain and they each have a specific function to play. I'm not the one to discover that. We can thank Huble and Weasel who discovered that in 1981 when they did work on cats and they mapped out what each of the individual neurons are responsible for, at least in, in part of the brain. So knowing that neurons have specific roles to play, the idea that we should study the brain from a frequency basis to me just doesn't make sense because. The activation of the neuron is gonna be based on what the person is doing with that neuron at that time. And so for that reason, I've created this technology which basically is testing what the neurons are able to respond to and it is able to map the brain with incredible resolution. So anyway, long story short we've managed to create brain imaging, structural brain imaging with EEG. It is accepted for presentation at the Alzheimer's and Parkinson's conference next year. So please join me there if you're excited to see some of the work. But essentially we are able to give you a result that is similar to a PET scan. You can actually look at the side by side, which we'll be presenting of PET versus EEG, and they are indistinguishable images. Full 3D full depth resolution. And it's because we have taken zero pages out of the book of arbitrary power ban frequencies. Oh, alpha delta wave, they mean something. I'm probably annoying certain people listening to this. I know that they have some utility, especially in sleep research and epilepsy. But we haven't taken any pages out of that book. Instead, what we've done is we've got we've created a system that looks at how the neurons actually function during their functioning in specific tasks. So this is not a resting state. You can't just sit there with your eyes closed and hope for an image. The patient is an active participant in our procedure but that's what gives it the end result. We hope that we can distribute this technology as a PET scan equivalent technology and a replacement. We're not there yet for that part. That will require a new FDA clearance. But what we are registered with the FDA for, we are selling a product that's already in the market. It's installed at Alzheimer's treatment centers. What that product is for monitoring effects of therapy, the ability to identify it, really high resolution, how neurons are behaving or misbehaving, how they're affected by these diseases. It is the first direct biomarker of neurodegeneration. It is the ground floor of knowing. Is the treatment working or not? And so that's what we are currently registered with the FDA for. That's what our product is currently available for. So if there are Alzheimer's physicians in the crowd. Who are treating patients successfully or unsuccessfully please reach out to us. I would love to help your clinic get that evidence. And of course, also have that follow up with the patient because every patient I've ever talked to has told me that they've never had their most important question answered. Is my therapy working? And having that answer, even if it is known that the therapy's working, the physician knows it's working. For the patient, this is night and day. To know that it's working gives them the confidence to stay on the therapy. It gives a placebo effect that in many cases is actually stronger than therapy. But it's that peace of mind that's so important. I think that right now adherence to therapy for Alzheimer's is extremely low. Something like 40%. These therapies are also very expensive or very difficult. If they're lifestyle. You may need to adopt a diet you're not used to. You may need to exercise in ways you're not comfortable with. Not having any feedback, not knowing if what you're doing is working. I think that's more depressing and more frustrating than the actual diagnosis itself of Alzheimer's. And I get a lot of inbound from patients, more than physicians. I get inbound from patients asking, please, this is my zip code. Where is a clinic where I can get this at? I need to know if therapy's working and this is the only product I've found that can do that for me. And they'll fly. The patient will get in the airplane and they'll fly to the state that has our technology. And I'm hoping that soon they can drive and sooner they can even walk to the clinic'cause it'll be next door. PET is a big equipment, capital intensive equipment. This thing fits in a suitcase, so I'll just leave it at that.

Dr. Ken Sharlin: 30:33

in perspective, i'm in southwest Missouri. if you're gonna do amyloid, PET, really any PET, but let's just say in for our argument's sake, amyloid PET, you need a cyclotron to make the actual tracer. Our cyclotrons are located in Kansas City and Columbia. Missouri area, which are about two and a half, three hours away. Then you have to make sure that the product retains a certain level of radioactivity so that by the time it arrives, it's still viable. There's logistics. Did the patient show up? Did they show up on time? All of these things,'cause you have to get that tracer in their vein and they have to wait a certain amount of time for it to distribute. And again, it's expensive and it's really in the case of Amyloid PET, is it ultimately the most valid, marker? It's just the one that's currently commercially available. And that's only been the last two years, from a PET from an Alzheimer's specific PET perspective. But I'm really, so you said a whole lot there that really made me think about a bunch of things. I'm gonna try to keep my questions simple. I actually have done quite a few amyloid and Tau PET scans, but only in the context of clinical research where companies like Eli Lilly built that into their protocol. I've never ordered the scans on the commercial side of the private community neurology side because I have other tools that I feel, give me equal information, if not better, less expensive like yours. But, when we're talking about functional imaging, that's really the operative word here. I'm gonna speak from a patient perspective, that folks don't necessarily understand the difference between, a CAT scan, which is a direct image of the brain that uses, fundamentally uses x-ray technology to MRI that's really measuring electro changes in electromagnetic fields. And then somewhere back there, there was a software engineer who knew how to translate that data into pixels, but it's still anatomical imaging in the end. It's indirect, but it's anatomical imaging. Then we get into functional imaging, how is the brain working? And historically, the modality within PET that we've used has been Fluoro-deoxy-glucose PET, and it makes sense because the brain uses glucose for fuel, for energy. And if we look at the distribution of the use of energy in the brain, we can get a pretty good handle of what parts of the brain are working well. What parts of the brain are not working well? Where if you're using the case of cancers, what parts of the brain are actually hypermetabolic? Using the all too much. So that really makes sense to me. Amyloid, it's an end product of a whole variety of factors that lead to disruption of protein production, protein folding protein degradation in the brain. We normally make amyloid. It's not a weird thing to make amyloid, so it strikes me as interesting. I'd almost think, if I said I don't know that much about Vistim and the technology, and I'm just saying this for our discussion purposes right now that paralleling FDG PET almost makes more sense to me than how do we translate the data into where this amyloid protein is distributed.

James Hamet: 33:54

I'm so glad that was your question here because you're not the only one who's asking it. Ohio State is actually planning a study with us at the moment which will be funded by Ohio State for looking at FDG PET. The reason we started with Amyloid PET was purely, I would say, coincidental. We were looking at Alzheimer's because we had access to those patients. We looked at Amyloid PET because I wanted to go in the structural route. And Amyloid PET is what's used for those Alzheimer's patients. Now that we have that evidence, that honestly even surprised me, the level of resolution. I'm very excited to see the results of the FDG PET and to your point about what other ways could this be more useful if we move away from amyloid, which I also agree with you, I think is, part of the immune system and not necessarily a bad thing. I'm looking at DTI imaging, right? For those in the audience who don't know what that is DTI is used to look at the structural connection of the neurons. Almost like a filament to see where they're broken in the case of a car accident or, maybe in a military setting. And an IED I think if we could look at that too and have the platform that basically does all of these images for you with one scan, that's where the multimodal comes in. Now we have the world's first measurement of neuronal health.

Dr. Ken Sharlin: 35:20

Do you, just getting back to amyloid for moments, I wrap my head around it and because I thought you painted a beautiful picture earlier when you were talking about, we're essentially taking the patient, taking the brain through a series of i'll just call it exercises images, whatever and essentially recording how the brain is working. how does that ultimately translate into amyloid? Is there a sort of a mathematical or digital coding assumption says areas where the brain is not working, there must be amyloid accumulating. So how do we get to amyloid from EEG?

James Hamet: 35:58

Unfortunately, I don't think I can give you the full picture because, there, there's some trade secret there, but I'll tell you that it's definitely not secret math. The AI that we've built is a very sophisticated AI that is way ahead of its time. The world of today is talking about large language models. Generative ai being able to create an image is so actually far away from, so far behind from where we are you can say, create me an advertisement that has a red car in it. You can be very specific but how do you use generative AI as a method of translating one imaging modality into another? And that's where it becomes very complex. We're talking about medicine here, right? There's no room for error. You can't have the red car be off by an inch. Because the AI misunderstood the instructions. So it has a very different, I'm gonna say pipeline. It has a very different structure from what the generative AI models are today, which are actually just basically large language models. We're not using any words in our model, just off the get go. No LLM is part of this process, whereas LLM is the foundation of all of the generative imaging of current world. So that's one part of it, but another part is the procedure. I think that EE G's been misused this entire time. I think brain imaging itself has been poorly implemented this entire time. And I'll draw a parallel to the heart. We used to treat the heart just like it was a bone, which is how we treat the brain today. A CT scan, an MRI, we'll do a fixed static image and here's your heart. Cardiac mapping was developed around 30 years ago. And cardiac mapping was looking at how the heart responds in real time, how it beats, how it does that role that it's designed for how the different ventricles inflate and deflate. In that process of pumping blood that invention, that discovery on its own dropped cardiac death rate, 60%. Okay, going from static imaging to this cardiac mapping drops, deaths due to cardiac reasons that by 60%. Now, when we look at the brain is a little bit more sophisticated than the heart. I'm sorry, cardiologists. But it is, and the reason that it is it doesn't have fixed patterns. It doesn't beat like a heart. The brain is 90% reactive and predictive. That's its job. Its job is to perceive the world, anticipate the future, and take action. That is not dictated by a rhythm, which is another gripe that I have with how EE G's been used. It does, it's not based on patterns the same way that the heart is. It's not based on temporal patterns other than maybe, circadian and the part of the brain responsible for controlling your heart and your lungs. We've been using brain imaging all wrong. How can you expect to get a static image from the brain and have that tell you the full picture of the brain's health? Additionally, how can you do something like an FMRI or an EEG, which does have more temporal resolution and expect to see something like a heartbeat when you don't know what's happening at any given moment? If I'm sitting in a chair doing an FMRI and I'm thinking about food, my brain's gonna look totally different than when I sit in that chair and I think about a movie I saw last night. And by the way, what was the context of that movie? Was it a murder mystery? Was it a horror? Was it a comedy? Just the words that I'm imagining in my head right now before speaking to them will cause the image to look different. And we know this because if you do an FMRI on a patient, you'll see in real time what parts of the brain are being activated. And just having somebody read a book is gonna show different parts of the brain light up as they read different words on the page. So what I'm trying to say here is that we can't look at. How one person, how their brain's health is changing, or we can't look at how that person might be different within a population of people if we can't put them on the same scale. These people have, we can look at one heartbeat versus another heartbeat. We need the ability to do that with the brain. What about having two people imagine the same thing. Now we're getting somewhere. Now we can see. Okay. What are the differences between these individuals? They both have the same task. They both have the same output. What is different in their brain with the same task? Where I got the original idea for this is actually from the very first experience I had with a doctor besides my parents. You get a checkup, right? You get a little hammer, they hit your knee and they see a reflex. That's how the brain works. You don't just kick your knee every second kick your leg every second. You need that input. And so that's the power of Vistim. That's where our technology comes from. And it's very sophisticated, very complex. I have no fear of anyone trying to successfully copy us because it takes so many experts in different industries to, to make this work. You need to know about carrier frequency theory, for example, to figure this one out. But, yeah, the long story short is it's all based on fundamental mechanics of the way neurons work. And then connecting that to, the basics of radio carrier frequencies. If you're able to follow that then maybe you have the first 10%.

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Dr. Ken Sharlin: 42:57

There you go. We've had lots of conversations. You're so much fun to chat with. And it makes me think, you, I, we've talked today about amyloid imaging and how the Vistim technology can reproduce amyloid PET scans. I think in the past we've talked about other protein markers, whether it's the TDP 43 of ALS, whether it's the alpha-synuclein of Parkinson's and multiple system atrophy and Lewy body dimension, so forth, and the capabilities are all there. What you're making me think a whole lot more about now though, is. The opportunities that this technology presents us with to not only, as you said, see the brain in action to track responses to treatment. What about, all of these biohackers that just, they don't necessarily have a diagnosis, but is the future going into your doctor for a preventative medical checkup and having a Vistim lab test to, get a handle on how your brain is working, and then actually like neurofeedback. We do that now with QEG and things like that. It's a way to really sit in a much bigger picture. How do you get your brain working better? How does this apply to people with autism, with learning disabilities, with all kinds of other things. If we can see the brain in motion and we can do things that change that connectivity on a moment to moment basis.

James Hamet: 44:25

Yeah, the future that I imagine is a future where getting a Vistim scan, which by the way we call Ceregram. Getting a Ceregram is something that you can do in any patient visit. It doesn't matter what specialist you're speaking with. It could be your PCP, it could be just a nurse. It could be maybe even on the ambulance or the EMT being able to get instant imaging, which is the tagline that we're using now. For any disease that affects the brain. So if the person's having their first schizophrenic episodes, they wanna learn more about that maybe the person feels like they're having cognitive issues and they wanna investigate this. Having the ability to detect these conditions as early as possible, even presymptomatically, if this is integrated in some type of annual wellness, then now we can take action. The physicians can take action. And treat this patient before they have those conditions. So in the context of, these health hackers, Brian Johnson and some of these other people, first I congratulate them and I commend them because I think what they're trying to do is incredibly difficult. There's millions of biomarkers that they can look at and some of the things that they're doing to themselves are potentially dangerous to their health, right? They're doing experiments on their body that not always pan out well. But I think that this could be a valuable tool for those people to see if what they're doing is benefiting their brain. One of the advantages I think that we have is that we have a strong dedication to science. We're not building something in a garage. All of our work is peer reviewed. We have academic collaborators. We focus on the underlying mechanisms of actions that nothing is, nothing goes unexplained. If you see that our system is showing improvement, you know that it is true improvement and it's not just, oh, I'm getting smarter. No, it's, this neuron is now more reactive to scenarios. It's supposed to be reactive to the term that we've floated around with some of the key opinion leaders is intra column resilience. The resilience of the neurons within the column that they play a role in. And so I think it could be useful for those people. But I will stay focused to the very first part of our conversation, which was why do you create a business to solve a problem? I think for me, the problem of the health hacker is not as important as the problem of the patient who wants answers. So if our technology gets used for by the biohackers, that's great. But my focus is to make sure that the patients. Who discover that they have some type of neurodegenerative condition that they get the treatment that they need so that they don't need anything else. They don't need to suffer from additional symptoms. They don't need to live their life in a wheelchair or with reduced agency. I want people to live happy and healthy and as long as possible with quality of life.

Dr. Ken Sharlin: 47:17

So as we're getting close toward the end of the interview, I wanna really bring this down to the practical, because you'd like to put a Vistim lab, Ceregram every clinic, every neurology clinic, maybe every psychiatry clinic, every this could be a groundbreaking, who has put a lot of his efforts into spec scan and his are for those listening. Great respect for him as a physician, as an entrepreneur thinker. His spec scans his are very unique to his brand. They're not the kind of spec skin. I can go to my local hospital and order a PET scan and it won't look like one of his, but my point is, that it certainly has, he believes his team the clinicians that work under him about the unique aspects of the patient and seeing that, not everybody with depression is the same. Not everybody with schizophrenia is the same and so forth. And really learn about the unique characteristics of that person's brain. And then what? Ultimately what personalized precision medicine is gonna be used to help them. So I see this technology fitting in the same arena where we really are learning a lot about the brain, the living brain the diseased brain, if you will, but our interventions are truly changing the way the brain is behaving. It's working and ultimately to some extent how it's structured, because we dream about neurogenesis and things like that. We wanna grow new brain cells.

James Hamet: 48:45

I believe that is possible, by the way, neurogenesis is possible and full reversal of these diseases is possible too. Those are two controversial statements, but I stand by them.

Dr. Ken Sharlin: 48:57

I'm with you. What does it look like if someone wants to get this into their practice? Is there, what does it look like? Is it's a quick and easy scan? Is there a workflow? Is there training? Obviously there's equipment.

James Hamet: 49:11

That's a great question. Since we've shipped and delivered and installed in clinics before you. The answer is that it'll be painless for you because we already got the feedback and improved and everything. That's good. Where everything is above board with the FDA, there are reimbursement codes available. The training time is incredibly short. We have a 10 minute video, and that's enough for you to know everything you need the setup of the EEG. We actually use third party equipment, the same that's used on the astronauts for the ISS, for the Chinese Space Station. Even SpaceX is using this system. So we're using that system and it all fits in a suitcase, which we will ship to you. So you you work with us, you get a suitcase. The suitcase has the EEG in it. It has the laptop in it. The laptop has all the software that you need to succeed. It has the stimulation paradigm, which is critical and which drives the brain's behavior during the experiment during the data collection. And then it also has the ANA analysis software. So that if you are interested in the end result, which I think everybody is you get that result within five minutes of completing the study. So two minutes to set up a 30 minute procedure. Five minutes to wait for the results. This is why we call it instant imaging. It takes place within an hour, which to some may seem long, but in the world of MRIs and PET scans, it is instant. And so that's what I can say there, that it's very easy to learn, 10 minutes to learn 30 minutes basically for your patients the results. You can print'em out, put'em in EHR and discuss right away in the same visit with your patient. We've seen no longer than one day of the person receiving the device to working with patients.

Dr. Ken Sharlin: 50:56

Is there a interpretation component to this?

James Hamet: 50:59

If you're asking in the context of CPT codes, I would say no, there isn't. We are working on that. There is a reimbursement for the EEG procedure itself. As for interpretation from a operations perspective. There is no operation interpretation necessary. If you like, you can of course, read the image as a radiologist would and interpret and, talk to your patient and say, Hey, look, it's getting worse, it's getting better. You can read it if you're familiar with that type of imaging. But we've taken all of the challenge out of that. We've made it very easy to see the differences. Prior the last exam with the Cerogram and the current exam with Cerogram, highlighting the differences giving you all the endpoints, not just the brain amyloid image, but also, the tau protein in their brain. What level is that at? What's the population average for these proteins? We've made it as easy as possible for the doctor to understand everything they need to know at a glance. Even cognitive biomarkers are in the report also provided through the EEG. It's just amazing that we've been able to predict patient results, cognitive, psychological, physiological, all in blinded studies, and know what the patient will score even before they take the test.

Dr. Ken Sharlin: 52:19

And that's so remarkable because if you look at this sort of whole evolution of the amyloid theory, amyloid imaging, anti-amyloid therapy, and there are many anti amyloid therapies that failed right in clinical trials, and they didn't fail because they weren't able to clear amyloid from the brain. Most of them cleared because it didn't make any difference clinically, patients didn't get. Better in any way just because the amyloid was cleared from their brain. It is it really is a blessing that finally we've got a FDA approved treatment that's a disease modifying therapy. Because my philosophy about his look, even if they're not, like the big breakthrough that we might hope for. They inspire us to do better and they give people hope of at least a little more, time, if you will of cognitive functioning. But we know that they really only in, in reality, the basis for the approval was a slowing in the rate of cognitive decline from. On average from about 27 to 35%. These, this goes back to the Betaseron days of MS, of 30% fewer relapses. And now we have high efficacy. Therapy approved that, I interviewed the folks from Octa Bioscience in my first podcast show, and, we're seeing drugs like Ofatumumab and Ocrelizumab basically just shut MS down. It's a day and night situation from 30 years ago in Betaseron, but we gotta start somewhere. And what's beautiful, I think, the STI test is that not only, yes, you're correlating. Amyloid, whatever that means,'cause there maybe we'll have, we should be thinking about other biological markers. But you, the nice thing is you're not just looking at changes in this, toxic protein are actually correlating it with cognitive changes, improvements, hopefully in the patient's functioning.

James Hamet: 54:15

Thank you. Yeah, I agree. I think that. When we look at treating symptoms, maybe we look at one symptom in particular, but when we look at restoring someone's health and reversing disease, we have to look at the full picture. I would not sleep at night. If we hadn't cracked the code on correlating the cognitive with the physiological. We have to look at changes that correlate with behavior and with the underlying mechanisms of action. Because if they don't correlate, we're still playing a guessing game and we don't know what's happening and what's causing what to change.

Dr. Ken Sharlin: 54:54

Well, James, this has been a completely eye-opening conversation. I just love chatting with you and your work really is helping to change the shape of what the next generation of brain health diagnostics and brain disease diagnostics will look like. And I'm really excited for our listeners to follow Vistim Labs as this all evolves, and I hope that many clinicians will be adopting this technology into their clinic. On behalf of everyone, listen really thank you for joining me on the Healthy Brain Toolbox. If they wanna learn more about Vistim Labs, you tell us where they can go and what they can do.

James Hamet: 55:30

Yeah, if you're interested in learning more, vistimlabs.com, it says right there in the middle, contact us. If you click that button, I will call you or you can email me and I'll email you. It'll be your preference. But I would love to speak with you and this doesn't just extend out to the neurologists in the audience, but also, if you're a patient, please share your zip code with us and we'll connect you with the nearest facility.

Dr. Ken Sharlin: 55:54

I know you've placed this technology in various clinical trial protocols as well, so there are sponsors who may be listening today. This is a great tool to get a real. Measure of the efficacy of the treatment that you're trying to develop. I think it's just absolutely brilliant. Folks, if you've enjoyed today's episode, please do subscribe, share, leave a review. We always want to do the best for you. And if there's anything that we can do better, that I can do better, definitely I'm listening. So thank you so much for spending the hour with us and I look forward to visiting with you next time.

COMMERCIAL BREAK: 56:34

Hi everyone. Dr. Ken Sharlin here with the Healthy Brain Toolbox. I'd love to hear from you. If you have general questions about brain health, neurology, or the science of keeping your brain sharp. Send them to questions@healthybraintoolbox.com. I'll be reading your questions on the upcoming episodes. Please remember, these need to be general questions, can't answer personal medical questions, or provide individual medical advice. So if you've ever wondered about brain health strategies, lifestyle tips, new research, or the future of neuroscience, send those questions in. I look forward to hearing from you and who knows? You might even hear your question featured on the show. Thank you for tuning into the Healthy Brain Toolbox podcast. I hope today's conversation gave you new insights to protect and nourish your brain. Be sure to subscribe, leave a review and share this episode with anyone looking to take control of their health. Until next time, stay sharp and keep learning.