IN BRIEF, WHAT ARE NMR AND MRI? 
HOW MANY MR MACHINES ARE THERE? 
ARE THERE OTHER THAN MEDICAL APPLICATIONS OF MR?
IS MR IMAGING A SAFE PROCEDURE OR ARE THERE SIDE EFFECTS? 
HOW DID MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING DEVELOP?
I DO NOT UNDERSTAND ALL THE ACRONYMS USED FOR 
CAN YOU PROVIDE AN OVERVIEW OF MR CONTRAST AGENTS?
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Yevgeni K. Zavoisky | The
Second World War had a major influence upon research - and its interruption. Germany,
for instance, the leading country in science and medicine at the time, quit the
race in the 1930s. But there was another country in which major contributions to nuclear magnetic resonance were made. They originated in Kazan in Tatarstan, which was part of the Soviet Union at that time and is now an independent republic within Russia. Until recently, Russian contributions to NMR and radiology were frowned upon or not even discussed in the West. Electron spin resonance was discovered at Kazan's university by Yevgeni K. Zavoisky towards the end of the war [55]. Zavoisky had first attempted to detect NMR in 1941, but like Gorter he had failed. The final breakthrough came with Bloch and Purcell in 1946. |
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Erik Odeblad | During the next few decades NMR developed in a wide range of applications. Hardly any of them were medical, although in vivo NMR already had been performed since the early 1950s. In 1955/1956, Erik Odeblad and Gunnar Lindström from Stockholm published their first NMR studies, including relaxation time measurements, of living cells and excised animal tissue [47]. Odeblad continued working on tissues throughout the 1950s and 1960s. He is the major early contributor to NMR in medicine. Oleg Jardetzky and coll. performed sodium NMR studies in blood, plasma and red blood cells in 1956 [32]. T1- and T2-measurements of living frog skeletal muscle were published by Bratton and coll. in 1965 [5]. In the 1960s and 1970s a very large amount of work was published on relaxation, diffusion, and chemical exchange of water in cells and tissues of all sorts. In 1967, Ligon reported the measurement of NMR relaxation of water in the arms of living human subjects [40]. In 1968, Jackson and Langham published the first NMR signals from a living animal [31]. In the late 1960s, Jim Hutchison at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland began working with magnetic resonance on in vivo electron spin resonance studies in mice. Hazlewood added to the work on relaxation time measurements by studying developing muscle tissue [24, 25]. Cooke and Wien worked on similar topics [9]. Hansen added NMR studies of brain tissue [23]. |
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Others joined
in this kind of research, among the better known being the research groups of
Raymond Damadian at Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn and Donald P. Hollis
at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Damadian's group measured T1 and T2
relaxation times of excised normal and cancerous rat tissue and stated that tumorous
tissue had longer relaxation times than normal tissue [11]. Hollis and his collaborators
achieved similar results, but were more balanced and scientifically critical in
their postulations and deductions [29]. Damadian
thought that he had discovered the ultimate technology to detect cancer and, in
1972, filed a patent claim for an 'Apparatus and Method for Detecting Cancer in
Tissue' [10]. The patent included the idea but no description of a method or technique
of using NMR to scan the human body. In February 1973 Abe and his colleagues applied for a patent on a targeted NMR scanner [1]. They published this technique in 1974 [54]. Damadian reported a similar technique in a publication two years later, dubbed 'field-focusing NMR (Fonar)' which contained a image of scanned volume elements through a mouse [13]. Still today Damdian tries to maintain the myth that tumor detection is possible with the method he described. However, it is impossible and would be detrimental to patients to try to detect, diagnose or characterize malignancies in this way. Furthermore, his apparatus was not an imaging device, and could not be adapted for imaging.
Ganssen's equipment to measure blood flow and Damadian's apparatus to measure relaxation times in vivo. Flow measurements
by NMR had also been discussed for some time. By 1959, Jay Singer had studied
blood flow by NMR relaxation time measurements of blood in living humans [53].
Such measurements were not introduced into common medical practice until the mid-1980s,
although a patent for a whole-body NMR machine to measure blood flow in the human
body was already filed by Alexander Ganssen in early 1967 [18]. Actual in vivo NMR spectroscopy took off in Oxford from 1974, with the group of Rex E. Richards and George K. Radda. Among others, David Hoult and David G. Gadian belonged to this group. |
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