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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. "
For all us laymen who don't know what MRI means: Google Glossary Search knows more!
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!
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.
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...)
Shoot, at one of the companies I am involved with, our MRI get lots of use from young, healthy folks who have injured themselves playing sports, hiking, biking etc.... MRI provides great visual access to bones and joints that previously was impossible without surgery.
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Nuclear magnetic resonance didn't seem a good technology to make into a scanning system.
I doubt that was it. Edward Purcell and Felix Bloch pioneered NMR spectroscopy back in 1946 -- and they won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1952.
The coolest voice ever.
I work researching and designing resonators for Electron Paramagnetic Resonance and the technology that has come from this is quite amazing. At the University of Chicago they are developing a way to image cancer cells using EPR. EPR is very sensitive to oxygen and in cancerous cells there is less flow of oxygen. This allows EPR to pick up dead spots where the cancer is.
EPR is very sensitive to oxygen and in cancerous cells there is less flow of oxygen.
While I am a physiologist by training, I am not an oncologist. However, that said, I should probably clarify your statement. Many forms of cancer are rapidly growing cell populations and therefore have high metabolic rates and therefore high oxygen utilization. Technically in these cells there is greater "flux" of oxygen through these cells but as they are imaged, they might appear to have lower levels of oxygen at any one instant due to their high metabolic usage.
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As the history books record, they were both dismissed as nutcases; when they did the first NMR scan of a brain, they were told that they had fabricated it. It's like Fred Smith of FedEx--his graduate paper on a hub-based air transportation system for packages was given a "C" by his professor (as good as an "F"), yet his idea "took off" (and in a very real way) just a few short years later.
Q: "Why do sound techs say 'check 1, 2'?"
A: "Cause if they could count any higher they'd be lighting techs."
Yes, it is. And it often takes some time to determine just how beneficial such work really is.
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As an example how likely do you think Yasser Arafat would be to receive a Nobel for peace today?
How likely Jimmy Carter NOT to receive one?
Sometimes you have to wait a fairly long time just to make sure you have identified the proper party.
I can attest to this with my own family's history. My uncle Albert Schatz invented streptomyicin, and another got awarded the Nobel Prize for it only a few years later. We're so sorry, Uncle Albert.
This sad state of affairs is now "common" knowledge and had the Acadamy waited 10 years or so to see how things shook out Uncle Albert would have had his Nobel. As it is he now struggles just to get recongnition for what he did, since only those "in the know," know he did it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,
They have only rarely caused injustice by prudence. They have jumped the gun and caused injustice on a number of occasions.
Prudence now seems the wisest course to them.
KFG
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.
The Bloembergen(sp?), Pound and Purcell paper published in 1948 anticipated imaging. The main thrust of the paper was NMR relaxation, which provides much of the contrast in imaging. The paper mentioned that some of the signal effects were localized to specific regions in the sample (the magnet they were using had really rotten homogeneity compared to modern NMR magnets).
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
A counter example:
...a two year turnaround. And you know what, they deserved it. ::Brian::
The Canadian's Banting and Best discovered insulin in July 1921, the only treatment of the time (and now) for Type I diabetes mellitus.
The first human to receive insulin got their first injection in January 1922.
The Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to the foursome of Banting and Best, (alone with McLeod and Collip for political/academic reasons; the story is a long and complicated one) in February 1923.