The Medical application of: Imaging

By: Elea Roberts

MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) Machine

MRI’s (Improvements)

MRI brain scan

About the inventor(s)Paul Lauterbur

-Born in Sidney Ohio on May 6th 1929.-He died of Kidney failure in Urbana on March 27th, 2007. -He won the noble prize (which he shared the honors with

Mansfield) in 2003.-Some of the images Lauterbur first took were of green

peppers, a couple of test tubes of heavy water inside a beaker of your average run of the mill water, and a clam his daughter found on the beach.

-He was in the army which is where he developed the interest to invent the MRI (based on his experiments with NMR).

Peter Mansfield• He was born in London on October 9th 1933.• He dropped out of high school when he was 15.• He spent two years in the British Military.• Worked in a print shop and a supply room.• Went to high school to get the counterpart of what

then was a high school diploma.

• He earned two degrees in physics.

Peter Mansfield Paul Lauterbur

The original inventor of the MRI

Raymond Damadian• He went to Julliard for

eight years to study the violin.

• He was born in New York.• He was inducted into the

National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1989.

(The other two dudes just made improvements to the original MRI)

Raymond Damadian

The Problem(s)• Exposure to ionizing radiation with past machines

had been a major problem and they needed a machine that wouldn’t put of the harmful radiation.

• Ionizing radiation is radiation that will create ions in a substance when it passes through it.

• This was a major problem because it would cause damage to cells and tissues.

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The Second Problem

• Doctors wanted to be able to observe the inside of a human’s body without having to do surgery.

• This had been a constant predicament through out medical history until the MRI was invented.

Weird surgery tools

Brainstorm!!!!!!!!!!

!!!!!

!!!!!!!!!!

!!!!!!!!!!

!!!!!!!!!

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• The first time that one of the two inventers had brainstormed the idea was years ago when Lauterbur was at a restaurant in Pittsburg.

• He had actually drawn the first improved model of the MRI on a napkin at the restaurant.

Design

• The design was already partly set up because of Damadian but Lauterbur and Mansfield made improvements byadding gradients and making

it able to be produced in two and three dimensions.

• Mansfield discovered how radio signals from an MRI can be examined.

• How to make the imaging process a bit faster.

Assemble->Test & Assess->Redesign

The MRI’s went through this a bit from when it started with Damadian’s design to adding Lauterbur and Mansfield’s improvements.

Lauterbur and Mansfield’s biggest redesign was when they made it towhere you could makethe images two and three dimensional and when they madethe image be able to process faster.

Test tubes

Share Solution

• Lauterbur published his improvements to a scientific journal called Nature which actually rejected his proposal at first.

• After much begging from Lauterbur Nature published his advancements to the MRI.

Nature Article

Controversy about the Nobel• There was much debate over who deserved the Nobel

Damadian or Lauterbur and Mansfield. • They said that without Lauterbur and Mansfield the

invention would not be useful to detect Cancer and that is why Damadian was not recognized.

• -Damadian did not get the Nobel but he still says “If I had not been born, would

MRI have existed? I don't think so. If Lauterbur had not

been born? I would have gotten there. Eventually."