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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.
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!
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.
The official press release from The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet.
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.
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 .
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
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...
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.