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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The
first fluorine images of a lung
The
first magnetization- |
At this time, many of the researchers working in Britain went to the United States. It was a major brain-drain for British universities, but there was (and still is) little money in the British university system. Most of the researchers stayed abroad, whereas many of the Continental Europeans who worked in the U.S.A. in the late 1970s and early 1980s returned home. Some of them had performed quite impressive research in the United States; among them was Robert N. Muller, who - in 1982 - described off-resonance imaging, a technique known today as 'magnetization-transfer' imaging [46]. Rinck et al. described the first fluorine lung images [52].
Peter Rinck and Robert N. Muller at Paul Lauterbur's laboratory after the first acquisition of a three-dimensional MR image of the heart (1982).
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| Paul C. Lauterbur received the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology in 2003 for the invention of magnetic resonance imaging. Peter Mansfield shared the Nobel Prize for his further development of MRI. From the Nobel Foundation's announcement: "Paul Lauterbur (born 1929), Urbana, Illinois, USA, discovered the possibility to create a two-dimensional picture by introducing gradients in the magnetic field. By analysis of the characteristics of the emitted radio waves, he could determine their origin. This made it possible to build up two-dimensional pictures of structures that could not be visualized with other methods. "Peter Mansfield (born 1933), Nottingham, England, further developed the utilization of gradients in the magnetic field. He showed how the signals could be mathematically analysed, which made it possible to develop a useful imaging technique. Mansfield also showed how extremely fast imaging could be achievable. This became technically possible within medicine a decade later." | |
| . Jürgen Hennig |
In the 1980s, Continental Europe started to contribute intensively to MR imaging. Rapid imaging originated in European laboratories. Jürgen Hennig, together with A. Nauerth and Hartmut Friedburg, from the University of Freiburg introduced RARE (rapid acquisition with relaxation enhancement) imaging in 1986. This technique is probably better known under the commercial names of fast or turbo spin-echo.
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Axel Haase
Jens Frahm | At about the same time, FLASH (fast low angle shot) appeared, opening the way to similar gradient-echo sequences. This sequence was developed at Max-Planck-Institute, Göttingen, by Axel Haase, Jens Frahm, Dieter Matthaei, Wolfgang Hänicke, and Dietmar K. Merboldt. FLASH was very rapidly adopted commercially. Hennig's RARE was slower, and echo-planar imaging (EPI) – for technical reasons – took even more time. Echo-planar imaging had been proposed by Mansfield's group in 1977, and the first crude images were shown by Mansfield and Ian Pykett in the same year. Roger Ordidge presented the first movie in 1981. Its breakthrough came with manifold improvements in many aspects of the associated methodology and instrumentation – from gradient power supply and gradient coil design to pulse sequence development, presented by Pykett and Rzedzian in 1987 [49].
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from a European point of view
