Who invented MRI technology?
1041011#2
Damadian has received several prizes. In 2001, the Lemelson-MIT Prize Program bestowed its $100,000 Lifetime Achievement Award on Damadian as "the man who invented the MRI scanner." He went on to collaborate with Wilson Greatbach, one early developer of the implantable pacemaker, to develop an MRI-compatible pacemaker. The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia gave its recognition of Damadian's work on MRI with the Bower Award in Business Leadership. He was also named Knights of Vartan 2003 "Man of the Year". He received a National Medal of Technology in 1988 and was inducted in the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1989.
Raymond Damadian
1041011#18
Damadian received a National Medal of Technology in 1988 and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1989. His original MRI full-body scanner was given to the Smithsonian Institution in the 1980s and is now on loan and on display at the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Ohio. In 2001, the Lemelson-MIT Prize Program bestowed its $100,000 Lifetime Achievement Award on Damadian as "the man who invented the MRI scanner."
Raymond Damadian
1041011#16
Damadian is the company's largest shareholder, with 8% of stock worth $6.5 million. Despite owning only 8% of the stock, he maintains almost 100% control of the company through a separate class of shares (Class C) that only Damadian controls 2007. Damadian later collaborated with Wilson Greatbatch, one early developer of the implantable pacemaker, to develop an MRI-compatible pacemaker. He invented a stand-up MRI system and has 15 MRI scanning centers across the United States. There are a number of independent MRI centers that use this technology both in the U.S. and around the world. The company conceived and built the world's first Upright Multi-Positional MRI, which was recognized as The Invention of the Year in 2007 by the Intellectual Properties Owners Association Education Foundation.
Raymond Damadian
22757120#1
"Fonar" was a dispute between medical device manufacturer Fonar Corporation and General Electric over Fonar's patent on MRI technology. Fonar's founder, Raymond Damadian, was issued U.S. Patent 3,789,832 (priority date 1972-03-17) for an "apparatus and method for detecting cancer in tissue" using the magnetic resonance of atoms. Damadian's patent was the first patent on an MRI machine issued in the United States. Also at issue was a later patent, U.S. Patent 4,871,966 issued in 1989, covering a method for obtaining MRI images of multiple planes at different orientations in a single scan. GE is a major manufacturer of MRI scanners, and Fonar sued GE for infringing these patents by producing its scanners as well as inducing others to infringe.
Fonar Corp. v. General Electric Co.
9883131#3
GEC also funded some of the development of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) using resistive magnet technology. At the same time, EMI Medical who had introduced the CT Scanner some time before using the principle of Godfrey Hounsfield, for which he won the 1979 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, were developing MRI using cryogenic magnets - which gave a higher field strength. At the time the maximum field strength with a resistive magnet was about 0.1T. With a cryogenic magnet, 1.0 T was easily achieved. EMI Medical went bankrupt at around this time so their interests in MRI were bought by GEC. This was a major impetus for GEC's acquisition of Picker Corporation in 1981.
GEC Medical
31480438#1
The Microwave Research Institute (MRI) was founded in 1945 by Ernst Weber at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (which later became the Polytechnic Institute of New York University). Research conducted at the institute included work in the areas of "electromagnetic theory, antennas and radiation, network theory and microwave networks, microwave components and devices." MRI was internationally regarded as one of the foremost centers of research on microwave field theory in the world. In 1985 it was renamed the Weber Research Institute in honor of its founder.Among its most prominent members were Nathan Marcuvitz, Leo B. Felsen, Dante C. Youla and Arthur A. Oliner, all fellows of IEEE and members of the National Academy of Engineering. The institute has attracted researchers from all over the world, including Alexander Graham Bell Medal winner Tsuneo Nakahara, who in 1961 was a visiting research associate of the institute, and who went on to be vice chairman of the Sumitomo Electric Company, and Dr. Oguchi, who became chief engineer of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone. Another faculty member closely associated with MRI was KunMo Chung, Director of the Plasma Physics Laboratory from 1967 to 1975, who served as Minister of Science and Technology of South Korea two times and who was associated with numerous international science and technology agencies.
Weber Research Institute
8769719#7
FLASH MRI was invented in 1985 by Jens Frahm, Axel Haase, W Hänicke, KD Merboldt, and D Matthaei (German Patent Application P 35 04 734.8, February 12, 1985) at the Max-Planck-Institut für biophysikalische Chemie in Göttingen, Germany. The technique is revolutionary in shortening MRI measuring times by up to two orders of magnitude.
Fast low angle shot magnetic resonance imaging
54544211#5
In 1983, Pettigrew undertook a position as clinical research scientist at Picker International, Inc., where he began work in developing nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, later called MRI, specifically for the heart. Picker was the first company to manufacture an MRI scanner, and Pettigrew helped develop their technology for cardiovascular imaging. Of the first 10 Picker MRI scanners installed worldwide, Pettigrew co-developed, along with A.V. Lakshminarayanan, and installed the cardiac imaging software on all of these systems. These included the first units at the Mayo Clinic, Wake Forrest University, and the NIH Clinical Center and several systems in Europe.
Roderic I. Pettigrew
35837096#2
In 1980, Paul joined the GE Research Center in Schenectady NY. They ordered the biggest magnet available – a 1.5 Tesla system – and built the first high-field whole-body MRI/MRS scanner, overcoming problems of coil design, RF penetration and signal-to-noise. The results translated into the highly successful 1.5 Tesla clinical MRI products of which there are well over 20,000 systems today, representing 60-70% of all systems. Paul did the first localized MRS in human heart and brain. After starting a collaboration on heart applications with Robert Weiss at Johns Hopkins, Paul returned to Johns Hopkins University in 1994, as Professor and Director of the MR Research Division. He works on the application of MRS to measure cardiac energy metabolism in the healthy and failing heart, and the development of interventional MRI technology. He has about 200 peer-reviewed papers with most-cited reviews of tissue relaxation in Medical Physics, and ~50 patents, including high-field MRI (>0.7 Tesla), spin-echo MRI, ‘crusher’ gradients, 'fat-saturation', '3D-slab' MRI, and 'point resolved spectroscopy' (PRESS), 2D spatially-selective pulses, MRI-safe implantable leads (licensed and sold as Avista™ by Boston Scientific Inc), and 'MRI endoscopy'. He is an ISMRM Fellow, 1989 Gold Medal recipient, a GE gold patent and Coolidge Fellowship awardee, and 2015 Gold Medal recipient of the American Roentgen-Ray Society.
Paul Bottomley (scientist)
32145408#2
In 1985 Cohen joined the MRI Applications Group at Siemens Healthcare where he began a career in MRI focused originally on education, and on technological improvements to reduce scan times. From 1988 to 1990 he directed the applications program at Advanced NMR Systems in Woburn Massachusetts, a small startup dedicated to the creation of a practical echo planar imaging instrument. He joined the faculty at Harvard/Massachusetts General Hospital in 1990 where he directed the "Hyperscan" fast imaging laboratory, and the MRI education program until 1993. Since 1993 he has been at UCLA, where he developed with John Mazziotta the first dedicated functional MRI imaging center.
Mark S. Cohen