Paul Lauterbur - The Development of The MRI

The Development of The MRI

Lauterbur credits the idea of the MRI to a brainstorm one day at a suburban Pittsburgh Big Boy, with the MRI's first model scribbled on a table napkin. The further research that led to the Nobel Prize was performed at Stony Brook University in the 1970s.

The Nobel Prize in Physics in 1952, which went to Felix Bloch and Edward Purcell, was for the development of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), the scientific principle behind MRI. However, for decades magnetic resonance was used mainly for studying the chemical structure of substances. It wasn't until the 1970s with Lauterbur's and Mansfield's developments that NMR could be used to produce images of the body.

Lauterbur is credited for the idea of introducing gradients in the magnetic field which allows for determining the origin of the radio waves emitted from the nuclei of the object of study. This spatial information allows two-dimensional pictures to be produced.

While Lauterbur conducted his work at Stony Brook, the best NMR machine on campus belonged to the chemistry department; he would have to visit it at night to use it for experimentation and would carefully change the settings so that they would return to those of the chemists' as he left. The original MRI machine is located at the Chemistry building on the campus of the State University of New York at Stony Brook in Stony Brook, New York.

Some of the first images taken by Lauterbur included those of a clam his daughter had collected on the beach at the Long Island Sound, green peppers and two test tubes of heavy water within a beaker of ordinary water; no other imaging technique in existence at that time could distinguish between two different kinds of water. This last achievement is particularly important as the human body consists mostly of water.

When Lauterbur first submitted his paper with his discoveries to Nature, the paper was rejected by the editors of the journal. Lauterbur persisted and requested them to review it again, upon which time it was published and is now acknowledged as a classic Nature paper. The Nature editors pointed out that the pictures accompanying the paper were too fuzzy, although they were the first images to show the difference between heavy water and ordinary water. Lauterbur said of the initial rejection: "You could write the entire history of science in the last 50 years in terms of papers rejected by Science or Nature."

Peter Mansfield of the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom took Lauterbur's initial work another step further, developing a mathematical process to speed the image reading.

Lauterbur unsuccessfully attempted to file patents related to his work to commercialize the discovery. Stony Brook chose not to pursue patents, thinking that the expense would not pay off in the end. "The company that was in charge of such applications decided that it would not repay the expense of getting a patent. That turned out not to be a spectacularly good decision," Lauterbur said in 2003. He attempted to get the federal government to pay for an early prototype of the MRI machine for years in the 1970s, and the process took a decade. The University of Nottingham did file patents which later made Mansfield wealthy.