San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
MRI scanner creator revolutionized health industry
Dr. Raymond Damadian, who built the first MRI scanner, which revolutionized doctors’ ability to diagnose cancer and other illnesses — but who, to his dismay, saw the Nobel Prize for the science behind it go to two others — died Aug. 3 at his home in Woodbury, N.Y. He was 86.
The cause was cardiac arrest, said Daniel Culver, a spokesperson for the Fonar Corp., which Damadian founded in 1978.
Since Damadian and his research assistants finished building the first MRI scanner more than 40 years ago, it has become an essential piece of medical equipment, allowing doctors to peer inside the human body with more detail and greater resolution than X-rays and CT scans provide, without exposing patients to damaging radiation as many other technologies do.
“We take it for granted now, but MRI is absolutely spectacular,” said Dr. Burton P. Drayer, chair of the radiology department at the Mount Sinai Health System in New York. “MRI is better at detecting cancers, particularly in the brain and spine.”
But the question of who owned the idea, and the device, was a contentious one from the start.
Two scientists whose research contributed to MRI technology were later awarded a Nobel Prize, an honor that Damadian felt should have also gone to him. And no sooner had his machine come on the market than a handful of major corporations started producing their own versions, leading to years of court battles over patent rights.
The vision of scanning the human body without radiation came to Damadian in the late 1960s, he said.
Working with rats, he discovered that when tissues were placed in a magnetic field and hit with a pulse of radio waves, cancerous ones emitted distinctly different radio signals than healthy ones.
He published his findings in 1971 in the journal Science and was granted a patent three years later for an “apparatus and method for detecting cancer in tissue.” It took 18 months to build the first MRI, originally known as a nuclear magnetic resonance scanner, or NMR. Its first scan, on July 3, 1977, was of Lawrence Minkoff, one of Damadian’s assistants — a vivid and colorful image of his heart, lungs, aorta, cardiac chamber and chest wall.
“Having birthed the original idea of the NMR body scanner, we were intent on being the first to accomplish it,” Damadian said in the book “Gifted Mind: The Dr. Raymond Damadian Story, Inventor of the MRI,” published in 2015.
But the technology behind the MRI had several fathers.
Acknowledging that he was inspired by Damadian’s work, Paul C. Lauterbur had figured out how to translate the radio signals bounced off tissue into images. And Peter Mansfield of England had developed mathematical techniques for analyzing the data, making the process more practical.
Incorporating those advances, Damadian’s company, Fonar, produced the first commercial scanner in 1980.
But Fonar was soon confronted with competition from major corporations like General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Siemens, Hitachi and Philips.
Damadian sued them all for patent infringement. He lost his case against Johnson & Johnson when a federal judge in 1986 set aside a jury verdict in favor of Fonar.
He won his biggest legal victory in 1997, when the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court’s award of nearly $129 million in damages and interest from GE. He also won smaller settlements from other manufacturers.