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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Graeme Bydder
Ian Young | Clinical Applications At about this time, MR imaging started being clinically evaluated. One of the most admirable research groups worked at Hammersmith Hospital in London. The head of the group was Robert E. Steiner, but Ian R. Young and Graeme M. Bydder were the moving forces. Among others, Frank H. Doyle and Jacqueline M. Pennock supplemented this group. Because MR imaging is at the crossroads between medicine and chemistry, physics, and computer science, groups with strong interdisciplinary relationships and cross-fertilization became scientifically extremely fruitful, which led to the 'odd couple' system, involving one physician and one scientist. At congresses, you would always see Graeme Bydder together with Ian Young, a seemingly ideal combination. There were (and are) other couples like them, but apparently this kind of relationship between radiologists and physicists does not fit into all European academic systems. Early clinical imaging was extremely difficult, time-consuming, and often disappointing. Spin-echo imaging, for instance, was a bigger step than many imagine. Today it is taken for granted, and it has helped MR imaging immensely to become a routine technique. Early MR images were mainly based upon proton-density differences, later upon differences in T1-weighting. By 1982-1983, the Hammersmith and Wiesbaden groups pointed out that long heavily T2-weighted SE sequences were better at highlighting pathology [6, 51]. It took some years until this was generally accepted, mostly because many companies claimed that long TE was neither possible nor necessary. |
| . Hanns-Joachim Weinmann |
Another European affair was the development of contrast agents. The possible concept had been described at universities in the United States by Maria Helena Mendonça-Dias and Paul C. Lauterbur [39], by Robert Brasch, and Gerald Wolf. However, most of the commercial development and scientific research took place in Europe. Schering submitted a patent application for Gd-DTPA dimeglumine in July 1981 in a project involving Hanns-Joachim Weinmann and Ulrich Speck. In 1984, Dennis H. Carr from the Hammersmith and Wolfgang Schörner from Berlin published the first images in men. Since the late 1980s, Magnevist has been commercially available, followed shortly afterwards by Dotarem from Guerbet in Paris. A number of other agents followed. |
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MR Equipment With the exception of the scientific instrument manufacturers, the hardware makers had no background in NMR. The most important scientific manufacturers were Varian in the U.S.A., JEOL in Japan, and Bruker-Spectrospin in Europe. Most scientific developments in MR imaging were done on Bruker machines. The first hardware manufacturer to get involved in whole-body imaging was EMI in 1974. Later the company was taken over by Picker (later Marconi, today Philips). Philips started research into MR imaging at the same time; P. Rob Locher, André Luiten, and Piet van Dijk were seen at many scientific meetings. Siemens got involved in 1977, Johnson & Johnson/Technicare in 1978/79, Instrumentarium at about the same time, and the others followed in the 1980s. M&D Aberdeen was a company originating from the research group at Aberdeen University. It had one machine in Geneva, but it disappeared a long time ago, as have a number of other companies. Another effort was the Finnish MR imaging machine. Raimo E. Sepponen, together with a number of other researchers, among them the surgeon Jorma T. Sipponen, aimed to develop a method and device for detection of internal hemorrhages. Their first clinical MR imaging model was installed at Helsinki University Central Hospital in June 1982 operating at a field strength of 0.17 T. The second unit operated at 0.02 T, and later units operating at 0.04 T, which at that time was politico-commercially a step in the wrong direction. With few exceptions, all early magnets for MR imagers were produced by Oxford Magnets. Still today many magnets come from companies in the Oxford area. Teaching, Training, Conferences There was and is an enormous need for user education in magnetic resonance imaging. The first European NMR imaging meeting was held in Nottingham in April 1976, followed by a second conference in Winston-Salem in North Carolina in the U.S.A. in 1981. Soon afterwards, the number of meetings exploded. Another effort aimed at teaching users in Europe started also in the United States in the early 1980s: the European Workshop on Nuclear Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, now known as the EMRF Foundation. The first Annual Meeting of the European Workshop was held in Mons, Belgium, in 1983, followed by meetings all over Europe. Today, the EMRF Foundation specializes in smaller meetings and supports young scientists with sponsorships and grants. The major European MR meetings are organized by the European Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine and Biology which was founded in Geneva in 1983, the European Congress of Radiology, and national radiological, medical physics, and MR societies. |
| References 1.
Abe Zenuemon, Kunio Tanaka, Hotta Masao and Imai Masashi: [Patent] Application.
Measuremen method from the outside [to obtain] information in the inside applying
nuclear magnetic resonance. Japanese patent application 48- l3508, 1973 (application
day: 02 February 1973. Patents pending in the United States, England, Germany,
France, and the Soviet Union). and : Abe Z, Tanaka K, Hotta M, et al. Non-invasive
measurements of biologica1 information with application of NMR. in: Llaurado,
Sances, Battocletti (eds). Bio1ogical and c1inical effects of low-frequency electric
and magnetic fields. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas 1974. 295-315. Secondary Literature o
Andrew ER. A historical review of NMR and its clinical applications. in: Steiner
RE, Radda GK. Nuclear magnetic resonance and its clinical applications. Brit Med
Bull 1984; 40: 115-119. Acknowledgements The pictures were reprinted with the friendly permission of the owners and/or copyright holders: Raymond Andrew, EMRF Archives, and the Nobel Foundation. For some images, no source could be determined. © Copyright 1995, 2009 by TRTF / EMRF. | |
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