Dr. David Arthur Strahle, MD

Dr. Strahle's early career in aviation, beginning in 1965, led to his becoming an avid pilot and flight instructor. By the age of 21, he had already taught hundreds of people to fly in the Flint community. Expanding on his extensive aviation background, Dr. Strahle graduated cum laude with a degree in aerospace technology in 1972. During his senior year, his research paper won first place at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Research Forum. It presented a new concept for identifying and tracking thunderstorms, which was installed nationwide in 2000. This research paper would have an impact later in his medical career.

His background eventually led to an upper level position with IBM, through which he earned an equivalent Master's Degree in 1974. He was assigned to IBM's largest commercial account where his responsibility included all 23 Chevrolet Manufacturing Plants.

Subsequently, the field of medicine caught his interest, and he left IBM to return …to pre-med courses, in which he achieved a 4.0 grade point average. He entered medical school as the first student to be accepted in his class of 100 positions. During medical school, he continued to teach flying at the Lansing Community College Aviation Center.

Michigan State University's Medical School is unique. The first two years are on the MSU campus in Lansing, and the last two years are off-site at one of five locations in Michigan. Dr. Strahle chose to complete the last two years of his medical training in Flint. This included rotations through all three of Flint's hospitals, working with most of the community physicians. In his first year following medical school, he completed an internship at McLaren General Hospital in Flint, rotating between internal medicine, radiology and surgery.

Near the end of his internship year, Dr. Strahle was approached by Michigan State University with a proposal to organize, initiate and operate a diagnostic radiology residency program in the Flint area. In the spring of 1982, he was the first and only resident in the newly developed Flint Diagnostic Radiology Residency Program. He developed and controlled most of the program, including the rotation schedule and the call schedule between all three of Flint's hospitals. This gave him direct one-on-one training with the instructors at the radiology department of Michigan State University.

Dr. Strahle passed his first written and oral boards (including the radiation section of the written boards) in the spring of 1985. As a new Board Certified diagnostic radiologist, he started his private diagnostic radiology practice at 2486 Nerredia Street in Flint, Michigan, in the fall of 1985. Blending his unique approach to the radiology problems facing the medical community (technological expansion of diagnostic radiology at a rapid pace) and his professional contacts within the community, the practice grew rapidly, acquiring first a radiology physician's assistant and, second, Dr. Randy D. Hicks, who in 1989 had completed the radiology residency program that Dr. Strahle started four years earlier.

In 2004 Dr. Strahle was notified of innovative Breast MRI research taking place on the West Coast. It was similar to Dr. Strahle's prior development of the above-mentioned advanced radar reports for the aviation community (these aviation reports are currently produced every hour by each of 140 radar sites across the country using the protocols established by Dr. Strahle).

Intrigued, Dr. Strahle developed an intense drive to develop 4-D (four-dimensional) breast MRI. For nearly a year, Dr. Strahle worked seven days a week on developing new protocols to markedly increase the ability to detect breast cancer at an early stage using MRI. With proper use and tools, breast MRI can now identify, with near 100% sensitivity, breast cancers as small as 1 mm, several years in advance of typical mammograms.