Raymond Damadian

Raymond Damadian was an American physician and inventor whose work led to the first magnetic resonance imaging scanner designed to image the human body.

Nuclear magnetic resonance: A physical phenomenon in which atomic nuclei absorb and re-emit radiofrequency energy in a magnetic field. Damadian investigated differences in nuclear magnetic resonance signals from normal and cancerous tissue.
Spin echo: A magnetic resonance signal produced when a radiofrequency pulse sequence refocuses dephasing nuclear spins. Damadian used spin-echo measurements to compare relaxation behavior in different tissues.
Minnie Joycelyn Elders: An American pediatrician and public health official who served as U.S. surgeon general. Elders presented Damadian with the Presidential National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2003.
Medical imaging: The use of techniques that create images of internal anatomy or physiology for diagnosis and treatment. MRI became one modality within the broader practice of medical imaging.
Magnetic resonance imaging: A medical imaging technique that uses magnetic fields and radio waves to create detailed images of the body. Damadian’s scanner was an early system built to produce images of the human body using magnetic resonance.
T1 relaxation: The recovery of longitudinal nuclear magnetization toward equilibrium after radiofrequency excitation. Differences in T1 relaxation formed part of the tissue contrast Damadian studied.
Peter Mansfield: A British physicist who developed techniques that made magnetic resonance imaging faster and more practical. Mansfield’s imaging methods complemented the pioneering scanner work associated with Damadian.
Whole-body MRI: Magnetic resonance imaging that acquires images covering the body beyond a single localized region. Indomitable demonstrated the ambition to scan a person’s body rather than isolated samples.
Cancer: A group of diseases in which abnormal cells grow and can invade or spread to other tissues. His early experiments compared magnetic resonance signals from cancerous and normal tissue.
T2 relaxation: The loss of phase coherence among transverse nuclear spins after excitation. Damadian reported differing T2 relaxation times between cancerous and normal tissue samples.

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RadiologyRelated: His early work helped motivate the use of MRI to distinguish diseased tissue.