The History of MRI Technology for Human Use

Dr Raymond Damadian MD
Builder of the first MRI scanner

Foundation Patron of the Australian Magnetic Resonance Imaging Association

Dr Raymond Damadian built the first magnetic resonance imaging scanner for human body medical imaging, revolutionised doctors’ ability to diagnose cancer and other illnesses.

Since Dr 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 harmful radiation as many other technologies do instigate Chronic Disease, Cancer, and DNA Mutation.

The vision of scanning the human body without radiation came to Dr Damadian in the late 1960  when he was working on nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy – which, until then, had been used to identify the chemical make-up of the contents of a test tube.

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 from 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 Dr Damadian’ s assistants – a vivid and colourful image of his heart, lungs, aorta, cardiac chamber, and chest wall.

Dr Raymond Damadian pioneering work was recognised when he received the National Medal of Technology from the US president Ronald Reagan in 1988, and also with an induction into the National Inventors, Hall of Fame in 1989. That same year he donated his first scanner, which he called Indomitable, to the Smithsonian Institution.

Dr Raymond Vahan Damadian was born on March 16, 1936, in Manhattan, and grew up in Forest Hills, Queens. His father, Vahan, an Armenian immigrant, was a newspaper photoengraver, and his mother, Odette (Yazedjian) Damadian, was an accountant.

Dr Raymond Damadian studied science when he received a Ford Foundation scholarship to attend the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He majored in mathematics there and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1956. He received his medical degree four years later from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and then became a fellow in biophysics at Harvard, where he became familiar with nuclear magnetic resonance technology.
(Extract from : The Sunday Morning Herald - August 22, 2022)

Dr Raymond Damadian travelled to Australia in October 2019 for the Inaugural Launch of the Advanced Imaging Master Degree Course in MRI at the Western Sydney University School of Medicine.