How Well do you Know the MRI Machine?

Do you ever sit back and wonder who did what? Sometimes people will look at something like their television set and wonder who they owe it to. Every major inventor and key figure in the Industrial Revolution did something to change the way we live life today. Diagnostic imaging and all its related technologies are no different in terms of their rich history. So, have you ever wondered about the MRI scanner? Do you know the MRI well, or feel you know it well?

Let’s start with what MRI stands for, magnetic resonance imaging. The first MRI was performed in 1977 and the first image took over five hours to generate. Since the first MRI was performed nearly four decades ago the technology has improved greatly. Let’s go back to how it started though.

The Napoleon Connection

Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier was a French mathematician and engineer that served as an officer in Napoleon’s army. This man’sFourier Transform was the reason for our ability to create images. The transform is a mathematical transformation method for heat transfer analysis between solid bodies. This mathematical method has been in use for nearly 40 years and remains a staple of the MRI.

The 1930’s

While, over a lengthy period of time, technologies were being created by people like Nikola Tesla there was no set imaging creation outside of the wondrous X-Ray. When the 1930’s came around, along with the Great Depression, came Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR).  With Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, magnetic fields and radio waves caused atoms to give off tiny radio signals.