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Nobel Prize for Medicine For MRI
andy1307 writes "American Paul C. Lauterbur and Briton Sir Peter Mansfield have won the Nobel prize for medicine for discoveries leading to MRI. Worldwide, more than 60 million investigations with MRI are performed each year, and the technique is ``a breakthrough in medical diagnostics and research,'' the Assembly said. The work was done on the 1970s. Lauterbur is at the Biomedical Magnetic Resonance Laboratory at the University of Illinois in Urbana and Mansfield is at the University of Nottingham in Britain. "
Finally! That's good. He had considerable opposition when he was developing the technology. Nuclear magnetic resonance didn't seem a good technology to make into a scanning system. His department chair cut off his funding at one point.
Subscribers can beat the rush and see it early
:)
For all us laymen who don't know what MRI means: Google Glossary Search knows more!
From the article:
"There are very few people around now that haven't been in an MRI machine these days..."
Does this guy really think that everyone in the world is very ill and requires the depth of testing of an MRI? (Maybe he's just really old and all his peers have been through MRI's...)
Why do I h8 apple?
American and Briton Win Nobel for Medicine
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) -- American Paul C. Lauterbur and Briton Sir Peter Mansfield won the 2003 Nobel Prize for medicine Monday for discoveries leading to the development of MRI, now relied on by doctors for getting a detailed look into their patients' bodies.
Magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, has become a routine method for medical diagnosis and treatment. It is used to examine almost all organs without need for surgery, but is especially valuable for detailed examination of the brain and spinal cord.
MRI can reveal whether lower back pain is is due to pressure on a nerve or spinal cord, for example. It can give surgeons a roadmap for operations, revealing the limits of a tumor. And since MRI itself does not require physically entering the body, it can replace some procedures that patients find uncomfortable.
Worldwide, more than 60 million investigations with MRI are performed each year, and the technique is ``a breakthrough in medical diagnostics and research,'' the Assembly said.
Monday's prize honors pioneering work done in the 1970s that laid the groundwork for making MRI a useful method, the assembly said.
Lauterbur, 74, discovered the possibility of creating a two-dimensional picture by producing variations in a magnetic field. He did the work at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, but is now at the Biomedical Magnetic Resonance Laboratory at the University of Illinois in Urbana.
``I'm surprised and very gratified,'' Lauterbur said when contacted at his home early Monday. ``In particular, I believe, I think the work has been helpful to many people, and I'm happy that has been acknowledged by the Swedish academy.''
Mansfield, 69, showed how the signals the body emits during an MRI exam could be rapidly analyzed and transformed into an image. Mansfield also showed how extremely fast imaging could be achievable. This became technically possible within medicine a decade later.
Mansfield is at the University of Nottingham in Britain.
``We've waited a long time, but I must say, I didn't really expect anything like this to come at this point in my life,'' he said. ``My 70th birthday is this week and although I'm retired, I'm still working in research, but I'd given up all hopes and ideas of receiving anything in the way of an accolade of this type.''
The prize for the two men is ``long overdue,'' said Sir George Radda, an MRI expert from Oxford University. ``These two people have clearly been the inventors of magnetic resonance imaging and developed it.''
The Medical Research Council, Britain's equivalent to the National Instititutes of Health, funded Mansfield's early work.
``They recognized even at the very early physics and engineering stage that this was worth supporting in the long run and it paid off,'' said Radda, former chief executive of the Medical Research Council.
``There are a lot of people who along the line contributed, like in all these cases, but they published the key papers.''
Radda noted that MRI has become very versatile, and can produce images that indicate brain functioning as well as anatomy.
``There are very few people around now that haven't been in an MRI machine these days,'' Radda said. ``It turned out to be extremely useful for looking at joints and knees, the brain, the heart -- basically every organ. The difficult one is the lung.''
Essentially, MRI provokes hydrogen atoms in the body's tissues to emit radio signals, which it then detects and uses to build up three-dimensional images of internal organs.
The prize includes a check for 10 million kronor, or $1.3 million, and bestows a deeper sense of academic and medical integrity upon the winners.
There are no set guidelines for deciding who wins. Alfred Nobel, who endowed the awards that bear his name, simply said the winner ``shall have made the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or
CMDRTACO CHECK YOUR EMAIL!
Monday's prize honors pioneering work done in the 1970s that laid the groundwork for making MRI a useful method, the assembly said.
Heck, the first whole-body MRI scanner was finished in 1977 -- and the Nobel Prize is being awarded just now? What am I missing on how long it takes for the committee to conclude that something has been revolutionary? I realize that Nobel Prizes must be awarded in hindsight, and that belated high-stature recognition is of course better than none at all, but the time gap still seems a little excessive to me.
The coolest voice ever.
Can you view the pics from the MRI via RMI to UIUC from UoN, UK?
IDTS....
Twin or more? ITA
Apache/Spring/La
Why are the Nobel Prizes always awarded so long after the prize-winning research has taken place? Is it part of the charter to make sure that the advance that's being rewarded is truly beneficial?
The reason most of the public knows MRI as MRI, and not NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance), is because people would be scared of the term "nuclear" as radiation and would avoid them. In fact, it actually does have everything to do with both nuclei and radiation, but why sit and argue what it really means with Joe and Jane Average? It's a very similar situation to the bad rap that microwave ovens initially had.
Note: This is not my factoid, I owe this to one of my EE professors who did research in this field.
The official press release from The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet.
This gives hope for us physicists who work on methods and experiments that seem to have no practical use at the time. Felix Bloch and Edward Purcell won the 1953 physics nobel prize for developing the technique of NMR.
Look at the list of previous winners. It's usually a long time before a Nobel prize is awarded.
Now, thanks to MRI, we get to see pictures of very interesting things such as sex in an MRI tube...
#define DRM chmod 000
Hey, I studied with Lauterbur! Actually, I dropped out of one of his classes after 1 week, when I realized I should have taken Linear Algebra first and I was in way over my head.
I have the exact opposite point of view. These routine news items like awards shouldnt be on slashdot frontpage at all. Look at slashdot, everytime a hugo award is given out its on slashdot (even though after harry potter getting it, its no more fun). Every time an Ig Nobel is announced its a story (Ok those are fun). Now Nobel awards are frontpage material. ..Maybe comments on stories add some informational value to the stories..
From the linked article
The physics award will be announced Tuesday and the chemistry and economics awards Wednesday in the Swedish capital.
This potentially means two more frontpage stories on slashdot and 3 if the Economics award goes to behavioral economics or computational (is there a term like this) economics.
This makes no sense because I can read it on newspapers anyway, no paper is going to miss the nobel awards. And the invention was in 70s and its not like slammer that we must know that NOW before its too late. Sorry for ranting
BTW did slashdot put up stories on fields medals??
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
Iq Nobel Prize this.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
The is great news that these two medicinists got the such a noble prize for their achievements. I wonder what that actual prize was...
With the advancements made in medicine over the years, I am very proud to be alive right now.
This was a real issue to get the public to accept this technology as a life saver without irrational fear.
The Nobel prize has traditionally been very slow to make awards. They are based not on scientifi merit, but significant scientifi merit. The committe has been burned a few times in the past when the awarded a prize for something that seemed revolutionary and worth a prize today, only to have significant flaws develope meaning the work that seemed for revlutionary is insignificant in 20 years. This work may have seemed cool 20 years ago (though other posters dispute that), but it has since shown lasting value to sciencie.
Remember, Nobel himself was interested in science for the sake of improving people's life. Science for science sake didn't really interest him. (More in the math FAQ on why there isn't a math award) Nobel himself wouldn't have wanted this award given in the '70s just in case it didn't pan out.
One other point, the committe takes into account personal background. If you deserve an award, but they feel your personaly life would lead you to "wasting" it, they will give the award to someone else. Turn your life around, and you may suddenly get an award at 60 for something you did when you were 25.
Of course the nobel committies are political. Some awards are given far too soon, and others are ignored for less achivements of "lesser" merit. Overall though, they do a fairly good job.
Although a Briton and an American may have invented the techniques behind Magnetic Resonance Imaging, the actual MRI scanner was invented by an Armenian: Raymond Damadian
Raymond Damadian has been the "David" in this battle since he first submitted to publish his original images in 1969.... and started to experience the "outsider syndrome". It was Damadian's experiment that led Lauterbur to employ a gradient field and achieve high resolution, using existing methods from Computed Tomography imaging.
Damadian has the patents on use of T1 and T2 relaxation times in MRI. I met him at a small seminar in the early 80's where he was about to abandon his attempts to defend his patents against GE, Seimens, et al. due to costs... he eventually won against all of them. He's at www.fonar.com and a nice summary of the controversy is at www.mult-sclerosis.org .
...to the guys who invented putting dead stuff in wax and slicing it real thin. Some wonder if it was because they came from the deli industry and not one of the classical sciences.
I had an MRI a couple of years ago, and one thing I was completely unprepared for was the humorous, Roadrunner-cartoon-like characteristics of the noises it makes. They did several sequences, and each had its own funny noise. Ba-doink, ba-doink, ba-doink... Frawnk, frawnk, frawnk... Galeep, galeep, galeep.
I even went online to read some technical explanations, but nothing explained why these noises have the humorous characteristics that they have.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Now if someone could figure out a way to make an MRI cost less than $5,000 per scan, I'd award them the Nobel Prize in a hearbeat!
Something that I always thought interesting was that Albert Einstein received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the photoelectric effect as opposed to his work in relativity. Relativity was such a contentious subject for so long that the Committee was concerned that awarding the Prize to Einstein for his work in it might prove to be mistaken in the future. Now, the photoelectric effect was no small thing, but his theories of general and special relativity were really something.
-h-
Anyone else know about info on this?
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Pioneering research into anti-claustrophobia treatments?
Asides from winning a noble prize I would also like to give it the award for "Most Annoying, Most Tedious and most Irritable Scan Ever". ... Quite annoying to say the least.
I detest those things, I work in a hospital operating the MRI/MNR scanner, and god damnit after a while the sound comes straight through my headphones with disturbingly loud industrial
Third year in a row the prize for medicine has been won (or shared by) Brits. We rock, suckahs!!
I've had some fun with MRIs too. After I got a head scan with a closed MRI, the tech picked up a screwdriver and gave it to me. I walked over to the machine, and felt a very strong force begin to tug and tug on the screwdriver. Waving it in the tunnel, it almost latched onto the ceiling. Luckily the machine was turned off, and the outside had some shielding, or I imagine would have been dragged accross the room.
The MRI technology was developed at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, right by where I live. The first machine over here was built with permanent magnets, dozens of them in metal brick form stacked to form the plates. The lab was situated right above the parking garage, which was unlucky for the cars below. People began to notice that all the cars parked in a certain corner wouldn't start if they were left there for a while. It turns out the machine wasn't shielded enough, and the magnetism was somehow draining all the car batteries below. The floor, as well as the walls, soon got lead or copper shielding after that. Can anyone explain to me why that happened?
Another interesting story there: One day, the custodian somehow ignored the red "In Progress" signs and entered while using the floor buffing machine. Immediately the machine was yanked off the ground, and dragged into the tunnel, where I imagine a patient was lying since the machine was on. The patient was OK, just had to crawl out the other side. The custodian was fired, and the radiologists were left with the task of getting a heavy twisted hunk of metal out from in between two permanent magnets. In the end, a tow truck had to use a winch to slowly pull the tangled floor buffer out. Owch.
Think also of the story of Robert Furchgott. When I first met him, in 1980, he was an emininent pharmacologist who had made important early theoretical and experimental contributions to the field. But he was getting on in years, and many people seemed to think that his major work was behind him. He was working on this obscure problem in pharmacology: he was trying to figure out how acetylcholine relaxes vascular smooth muscle to (dilate blood vessels).
It was an obscure problem because acetylcholine doesn't actually seem to play much of a role physiologically in controlling vascular smooth muscle. But Furchgott had discovered that if he prepared his smooth muscle samples really cleanly, with no endothelium (the "skin" on the inside of the vessel) attached, acetylcholine no longer worked. He figured out that the endothelium had to be releasing somthing, which he named "Endothelium Derived Relaxing Factor," EDRF for short. Evenually he and others identified EDRF as nitric oxide, and for this he shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Medicine.
What makes this particularly cool is that Nobel supposedly established his Prizes because he felt kind of bad about some of the uses to which his great discovery had been put--namely, the stablized form of nitroglycerine known as dynamite. However, nitroglycerine also has a medical use, relieving the pain of angina. Nobody knew how it did this, until Furchgott's discovery opened up the nitric oxide field, and nitroglycerine was recognized to act by releasing nitric oxide (thereby dilating blood vessels in the heart and improving blood flow).
And of course, a few years later, Furchgott's discovery led to the development of Viagra...
That reminds me, I need to go to class. Damn you Slashdot! Damn you!
The money for the Nobel foundation comes from the discovery of dynamite. The money is going to people whose invention saves a lot of lives.
Wow - a great day for the University of Illinois. Even though the research wasn't done here, it is great that one of the nicest professors (and a professor in the graduate program I am in) was awarded such an honor. Just to chime in with the other facts and tidbits here, note that the other awardee also did a research assistantship/postdoc at U of I in the early 60s :)
Must be all that sweet corn
I don't see anything in there saying "in the past 20 or 30 years...make sure you wait so you don't have egg on your face."
I agree that in the field of science waiting is prudent but I have never understood where the Committee gets the legal backing for doing it the way they do. In my mind the greatest effect is in the Literature field, which has become a de facto lifetime achievement award when that seems to have been very far from what Nobel intended.
In the 1950's, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) was developed as a method to analyze organic molecules, and could very accurately show the different functional groups (alcohols, ethers, aldehydes, etc) in a given sample. This allowed identification of almost any organic molecule, and won the Nobel Prize in the late 50's or early 60's. When MRI first came out, people viewed it as a simple extension of NMR - "Instead of an organic sample, let's use the human body as a sample and look for the same shifts!" That's why MRI hasn't won a Nobel in 30+ years.
I know most of the pulse sequence designers for GE's MRI scanners - trust me, the noises aren't the only strange thing in that department. A bunch of brilliant physicists and computer scientists, to be sure, but uniformly goofy.
That having been said - the physics dictates the sound. You've got three gradient coils around you, for X,Y, and Z, each of which are pulsing in the audio frequencies, so an RF pulse can excite a particular area for imaging.
Originally, the gradient amps for GE's scanners were Techron 8603's, which had an analog input on the front panel. Some interesting (and highly unauthorized) experiments took place involving Dark Side of the Moon and that analog input; an MRI scanner is a very good speaker...and the effect of lying in the tube with that music swirling around is absolutely indescribable.
Who the hell gets on the Nobel committee and how the hell do they come up with this crap? Another case of where the people that made the real discoveries are unrewarded.
What happened to the people from the team at the Department of Biomedical Physics at the University of Aberdeen who made the critical breakthrough to make all this practical, and produced the first whole body scanner to take an image of a real live patient?
Further if fast imagining was "discovered" by Sir Peter Mansfield, how come the two dimensional Fourier transform methods used in all scanners worldwide and known as "spin-warp", the real breakthrough in MRI (yes the warp is because the person who came up with it was a Trek fan), where discovered by someone else?
Without the spin warp technique MRI would have remained an interesting but clinically useless technique. One has little faith in the ability of the Nobel committee to award prizes to those that should get them.
Really so all those patents held by the British Technology Group are a figment of my imagination then? Those critical patents that allow an image to be acquired in a clinically useful period of time that is.
I am glad to see that the Nobel Committee has finally awarded this. As a medical image analysist I have worked with MR for many years now. What the area needs to do now is move away from the idea of an MR scanner as something which produces pretty pictures and start to think of it as a measurement device. The scanner manufacturers focus on producing nice looking pictures for the clinicians to look at, often at the expense of reproducible, accurate measurements. I also doubt whether anyone will be receiving any awards for DICOM the industry standard format for getting data off the scanner. And you think your tax form is overly complex....
-- "Can't sleep, clowns will eat me!"
Am I the only one amused at this?
Guess so...
Who supported blowing up citizens again?
Here is a link to a nice essay on the different contributions of Lauterbur and Damadian. The bottom line in my opinion is that Damadian published first.
t in gOverCreditForMRI.html
http://www.mult-sclerosis.org/news/Jun2002/Figh
you are not scientifically inclined. you are a cultist zealot. you were planning to murder people by throwing metal objects at them.
you know nothing of who and why and how MRIs were made. you live near new york becaue your terrorist ass likes to see your terrorist friends' handiwork.
your terror plan failed to murder teh patient. you are the fucknig janitor int he story. you muhammed atta fucking towelhead.
I was working on a radio doc about tomography and now these guys are going to be hard to interview.
Side note- he was also a graduate of the Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland, Ohio, my alma mater (now Case Western Reserve University). Go Case!
rather like gould/maiman ahead of schawlow/townes
for the laser. it's not so much who is first
with the practical invention as who best explains
the science early on.
slighting key contributors from credit is bad
enough when hidebound committees do such,
but even worse when the awardees do.
(e.g. rosalind franklin anticipating
watson/crick for DNA seems to fit this
category, as does newton erasing the memory
of hookes.)
one way to help attenuate such slights is
overthrow the rule that a max of three
can be awarded the same prize. the requirement
of being alive at award-time seems useful
for some things but spells trouble in helping correct oversights.
then there's just plain incorrect politics,
such as that which undermined borges from
getting the nobel for literature.
I remember the debate over that issue--it took place at a meeting of the Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine about 1984 or 85. On one side were the clinicians who felt that the word "nuclear" would unnecessarily scare the public about a modality that in face uses no ionizing radiation, and possibly set back the development of clinical MRI. On the other side were the physicists who knew "nuclear" wasn't synonymous with "radioactive" (of cource the clinicians did too) and didn't want their perfectly good scientific term bowdlerized. Incidentally, Lauterbur coined the term zeugmatography for the technology, but obviously it didn't stick. http://www.google.com/search?q=zeugmatography&ie=U TF-8&oe=UTF-8 : 398 hits, MRI: 8.1 million hits
Matthew Mitchell, Ph.D.
[Lauterbur lab, Stony Brook, 1982]
MRI has been valuable in helping diagnose organic ED in men.
penis enlargement abc's
Everyone knew there was going to eventually be a Nobel, so there was some jostling for recognition. Nobody jostled more, or was more offended at being left out, than Damadian.
In the end, neither Lauterbur's method (reconstruction from projections, analogous to CT) or Damadian's method (sensitive point) lasted very long; neither was anywhere near as efficient as spin-warp imaging and subsequent methods.
Matthew Mitchell, Ph.D.
[did the first clinical trial quantitatively proving MRI to be more effective than other modalities for a particular diagnosis (in this case avascular necrosis of the hip) (published in AJR 1984). Wasn't groundbreaking stuff, but it did eventually lead ten years later to my current job in technology assessment.]
I will always call it by it's proper name NMR
I'm a biophysicist with a medical degree. Even published a paper on TDR measurements of water structure, a sort of poor man's MRI. All this gives me a unique perspective encompassing both the medical and physics aspects.
I can remember Damadian at Biophysical society meetings in the early 70's describing how to use T1 and T2 as imaging modalities. It flat astounds me that he was not honored with this years prize.
It is true that the technical aspects diverged from his original work. But this is like saying the Wright Brothers did not invent powered flight just because even slightly later aircraft were rather different from their original "Flyer".
True, and modern aircraft don't look like the Wright Brother's flyer. This does not mean they didn't invent powered flight... Peter H Proctor, PhD, MD
The Slashdot announcement of the MRI Nobel Prize incorrectly lists Prof. Lauterbur's affiliation as the Biomedical Magnetic Resonance Laboratory at the University of Illinois. While this was true a few years ago, his principal appointment is now in the Department of Chemistry (www.scs.uiuc.edu/chem/). Slashdot readers would find more information about Prof. Lauterbur (including his homepage) if the main announcement were corrected and the Slashdot sidebar gave this link rather than the one to the BMRL.