WebDrone:
I've been following this FONAR discussion with interest and, like you, am an Old Futzer in MR . I believe I have met you, maybe at a Workshop in Milwaukee? From your Project description I might also have been one of the tourists in your labs, ten years ago, if they were housed in an old army barracks-like building of the Electric and Computer Engineering Department at the UW in Madison, where I was visiting then. Right person?
Yes you are straight on about Jay Singer at Berkley, whose work on
peripheral vascular human flow measurement using NMR in real people
began with publications in 1959, and continued through the 1980s. Your observations on actual the "FONAR" (Field fOcussed Nuclear mAgnetic Resonance) scanner, built until about 1983, are also correct ... the FONAR-machine design (not a modern MRI gradient scanner) was first described by a Japanese research group, some relatively
famous scientists .. including Abe and Tanaka. Their later US patent
issued in late 1975 or early 1976, considerably before "FONAR" began
to constuct that design and named it "FONAR". Also Lauterbur's written Invention Record and Disclosure for the gradient Fourier encoding (modern MRI) concept has been published (in a book very much oriented toward Dr. Damadian). Paul Lauterbur's 1971 Disclosure was for NMR Specialties where both Damadian and Lauterbur were doing research in the early 1970's. It is dated September of 1971, 7 or 8 months before Dr. Damadian filed his patent application to use relaxation times to diagnose cancer (in pathologist excised specimens). Lauterbur also published the first MR image, just
a feasibility demo using a water "lab phantom" setup.
Damadian's "1974 patent" later was dismissed in Patent Court as invalid for in-vivo measurements (it did not teach how one could localize an in-vivo NMR measurement, by any
physically possible technique. This occurred in a 1980s (unsuccessful) suit FONAR brought for MRI infringement against Technicare/ Johnson-and-Johnson -- in which I was a backup "disinterested" consultant.
However, when all is said and done, WebDrone, I think that you should not be too critical, but cut some slack for Raymond Damadian .. credit for a most remarkable history of activity. He was surely the one who did bring publicity and recognition to NMR measurement for discriminating different kinds of tissues ... it is just too bad
that the Cancer Detection he published later turned out not to
apply.. except to the rodent tumor models he first studied. Still, in those first papers, he DOES state how important it might be if one could only measure localized internal NMR signals in-vivo for humans -- and in a Biology/Biophyics oriented paper. Jay Singer said the same, as did Nobel Lauerate Ed Purcell, but their papers were all in heavy Physics, Applied Physics and IEEE Journals ..they did not generate the awareness that Damadians "Science" papers did.
In passing, people here name "Dave Terry". Perhaps I am misremebering, but wasn't Dr. Damadian's wife a Terry?
Could this be the "brother in law" Terry who once did FONAR
fund raising in the late 1970s? I seem to recall also a "Terry
Books" outlet for FONAR sponsored works somewhere on Long Island.
Ciao,
SpinShooter
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