Scanner changed way illness is viewed
Sir Peter Mansfield Pioneer of MRI diagnostics BORN OCTOBER 9, 1933 - DIED FEBRUARY 8, 2017 AGED 83
JUST before leaving school at 15 without any qualifications, Sir Peter Mansfield was asked by his careers counsellor what he wanted to do. “Well, I wouldn’t mind being a scientist,” came the reply. Stunned at the teenager’s choice, the incredulous counsellor suggested he seek a more practical vocation.
However, Mansfield stuck with his original idea and in doing so helped revolutionise modern medicine with his pioneering work on magnetic resonance imaging – MRI.
The technology has enabled doctors to diagnose and examine injuries to ligaments, bones and organs without cutting open the body or exposing it to the radiation risks of X-rays. In 2003 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Professor Lauterbur for their work on MRI.
The son of a gas fitter, Mansfield was born in Lambeth, London, the youngest of three brothers. After failing his 11-plus, he left school four years later to become a printer’s assistant while taking O-levels at evening classes. By 18 he had become interested in rockets and took a job at the Rocket Propulsion Establishment in Westcott, Buckinghamshire. Following National Service he returned to Westcott to take his A-levels and then enrolled at Queen Mary College, London to study physics where he graduated with a first.
It was here that he learned about nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), the physical phenomenon in which nuclei exposed to a magnetic field absorb and re-emit electromagnetic radiation. In 1964, Mansfield started as a lecturer at the University of Nottingham, where he set to work improving NMR-based imaging, which would later be called magnetic resonance imaging.
He realised that by applying a magnetic field that was stronger on one side than the other, it could yield three-dimensional information about the structure being imaged.
Mansfield was the first person to be scanned in an MRI machine, in a prototype he’d built in 1978, despite concerns that the procedure could potentially trigger a heart attack.
“In fact the scan went well and after 50 minutes and sweltering heat, I got out of the machine dripping like a wet rag,” he wrote in his 2013 autobiography, The Long Road To Stockholm: The Story Of MRI. Over time he developed a faster technique called echo-planar imaging which could assemble an image in less than a second.
He received his knighthood in 1993 and a year later retired from the University of Nottingham but continued working as an emeritus professor. His first MRI scanner is at the London Science Museum.
He is survived by wife Jean and their daughters Sarah and Gillian.