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    		• Like any history... , the history of MRI has no real beginning! (23/70)

    Click here to see our objects about MRI

    One major contribution to the technique can be found (1822) in Napoleon's realm, Jean - Baptiste Fourier (1768 - 1830) France. However, the focus of his life was mathematics, without his Fourier transform, we would not be able to create MR images.

    In 1946, two scientists in the U.S. , independently of each other, described a physicochemical phenomenon based on the magnetic properties of certain nuclei in the periodic system. This was named nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. The "resonance" phenomenon is governed by a simple relation between the strength of magnetic field and the frequency of radio waves. For every atomic nucleus with unpaired protons and / or neutrons it is possible to determine the wavelength as a function of the strength of the magnetic field. The phenomenon was demonstrated already in 1946 for protons (hydrogen nucleus) by Felix Bloch (1905 - 1981) and Edward M. Purcell (1912 - 1997) in the USA; they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1952. The first British pioneer was Bernard Rollin (1911-1969) in the Clarendon labs, Oxford. Immediately after this first publication in 1946, he built his first NMR spectrometer and by November the same year he published his first paper in Nature.

    During the next few decades, NMR developed a wide range of applications. Hardly any of them were medical, although in vivo NMR already had been performed since the early 1950s. In 1955/1956, Erik Odeblad (1922 - I ) and colI. of Stockholm published their first NMR measurements of living cell and excised animal tissue.
    In the late 1970s, Jim Hutchison (1940 - ) of Aberdeen in Scotland began working with MR on in vivo electron spin resonance studies in mice. Others joined in, including the research groups of Raymond Damadian (1936 - ) at Downstate Medical Centre in Brooklyn, New York, and Donald P. Hollis (1932 - ) at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Damadian's group measured T1 and T2 relaxation times of excised normal and cancerous rat tissue. All the experiments up to that point had been one - dimensional and lacked spatial information.

    In September 1971, when the world's first CAT scanner was installed in England by EMI, Paul Lauterbur (1929 -) of the State University of New York at Stony Brook had the idea of applying magnetic field gradients in all three dimensions and the CAT scan back projection technique to create NMR images. He published the first images of two tubes of water in March 1973 in the journal Nature.Lauterbur's idea revolutionized NMR because it opened the field to imaging. A great advantage with MRI is that it is harmless according to all present knowledge. The method does not use ionising radiation like radiography or computed tomography.

    In the 1980s, Continental Europe began to contribute intensively to MRI. Rapid imaging originated in European laboratories. Peter Mansfield (1933 -) a British physicist of the University of Nothingham, developed the first MRI echo-planar pulse sequence in 1976. He developed also a prototype of modern gradient-coil systems and a whole-body MR scanner. In 1976 also, Damadian and coIl. , working at SUNY at Brooklyn, employed a field Focussing Nuclear Magnetic Resonance technique (FONAR) to produce the first NMR image of a tumor in a live animal. A year later a human wrist was imaged and the first in vivo human whole-body NMR tomographic scan (image of an individual slice) was produced. In the latter scan, crude by current standards, the heart, lungs, mediastinum, and descending aorta could be detected. Lauterbur and Mansfield (without Damadian!) won the 2003 Nobel Prize in Medicine.

    In the early 1980s European scientists working they founded the European Workshop on NMR in Medicine, known today as the EMRF Foundation. Its first annual meeting was held in Mons, Belgium, in 1983.

    In Continental Europe, the first medical MR equipment (0,15 Tesla) of Technicare was set up at the institute Andre Defalque in Charleroi (Belgium 1982).

    In that same year, Michel Collard (1934- ) of Montigny - Ie - Tilleul Hospital published the first Belgian paper about this topic at the Royal Academy of Medicine in Brussels. So, the history of MRI is ... only just beginning!