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1882: Electrical and mechanical engineer Nikola Tesla discovered the rotating magnetic field in Budapest, Hungary. This was a crucial discovery in the realm of physics. The Tesla unit will also be used to measure the strength of magnetic fields in later developments.
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1937: Columbia University Professor Isidor I. Rabi working in the Pupin Physic Laboratory in New York City, observed the quantum phenomenon, also nicknamed the nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). He found out that the atomic nuclei show their presence by absorbing or emitting radio waves when exposed to a sufficiently strong magnetic field.
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1946: Felix Bloch of Stanford and Edward Purcell of Harvard shared the Nobel prize in 1952 for developing a way to measure the phenomenon that underpins MRI: nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). The nuclei of atoms behave like tiny, spinning bar magnets. When placed in a strong, static magnetic field, nuclei tend to align with it. When zapped with the pulse of radiowaves, the nuclei absorbs energy and changes direction. The time it takes to return to its original state of alignment can be used to measure radio frequency in the magnetic field.
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Late 1960s: Dr Raymond Damadian, at the time a physician at State University of New York's medical centre in Brooklyn, was among the first to contemplate using NMR to scan the human body for disease. In 1971, he discovered that hydrogen signal in cancerous tissues were different from healthy tissues because tumours contained more water and thus more hydrogen atoms in the form of water. When the NMR machines were switched off, radio waves from cancerous tissue will linger longer then those from the healthy tissue.
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1973- Dr Paul Lauterbur, a chemist and an NMR pioneer at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, along with Sir Peter Mansfield, a physicist at the University of Nottingham in Britain, contributed to producing the first NMR image of a test tube. They came up with the idea of superimposing small variations and gradients in the magnetic field used in the NMR spectroscopy. This enabled the tuning of the NMR machine to detect hydrogen nuclei, abundant in the body's tissue. The two scientists were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in medicine for making discoveries that led to modern magnetic resonance imaging. The NMR scan became known as the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scan instead.
1977: Dr Damadian achieved the first scan of a healthy human body and human body with cancer.
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1978 to 2000: Further developments by various scientists and students of different universities occurred. Improvements most notably includes producing images of the scan in real time. The MRI scan became primarily used for neuroimaging and musculoskeletal imaging. Cardiac MRI, fetal imaging and f(MRI) are some further developments that are routine in many imaging centers today.