History of magnetic resonance imaging
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The history of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) includes the work of many researchers who contributed to the discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and described the underlying physics of magnetic resonance imaging, starting early in the twentieth century. One researcher was American physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1944 for his discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance, which is used in magnetic resonance imaging. MR imaging was invented by Paul C. Lauterbur who developed a mechanism to encode spatial information into an NMR signal using magnetic field gradients in September 1971; he published the theory behind it in March 1973.[1][2]
The factors leading to image contrast (differences in tissue relaxation time values) had been described nearly 20 years earlier by physician and scientist Erik Odeblad and Gunnar Lindström.[3][4] Among many other researchers in the late 1970s and 1980s, Peter Mansfield further refined the techniques used in MR image acquisition and processing, and in 2003 he and Lauterbur were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their contributions to the development of MRI. The first clinical MRI scanners were installed in the early 1980s and significant development of the technology followed in the decades since, leading to its widespread use in medicine today.