Raymond Vahan Damadian (; March 16, 1936 – August 3, 2022) was an American physician, medical researcher, and inventor of the first nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) scanning machine.
Damadian's research into sodium and potassium in living cells led him to his first experiments with nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) which caused him to first propose the MR body scanner in 1969. Damadian discovered that tumors and normal tissue can be distinguished in vivo by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) because of their prolonged relaxation times, both T1 (spin-lattice relaxation) or T2 (spin-spin relaxation). Damadian was the first to perform a full-body scan of a human being in 1977 to diagnose cancer. Damadian invented an apparatus and method to use NMR safely and accurately to scan the human body, a method now well known as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).Inventor of the Week Archive
Damadian received several prizes. In 2001, the Lemelson–MIT Prize Program bestowed its $100,000 Lifetime Achievement Award on Damadian as "the man who invented the MRI scanner."Lemelson–MIT Lifetime Achievement Award on Dr. Damadian as "the man who invented the MRI scanner" He went on to collaborate with Wilson Greatbach, one early developer of the implantable pacemaker, to develop an MRI-compatible pacemaker. The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia gave its recognition of Damadian's work on MRI with the Bower Award in Business Leadership."Denied Nobel for M.R.I., He Wins Another Prize", New York Times, March 23, 2004 He was also named Knights of Vartan 2003 "Man of the Year". He received a National Medal of Technology in 1988 and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1989.Raymond Damadian receives the National Medal of Technology in 1988 and is inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1989.
Biography
Early life Raymond Vahan Damadian was born in New York City, to an Armenian family. His father Vahan was a photoengraver who had immigrated from what is now Turkey, while his mother Odette (née Yazedjian) was an accountant. He earned his bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1956, and an M.D. degree from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City in 1960. He studied the violin at Juilliard for 8 years, and played in Junior Davis Cup tennis competitions.Chuvala, Bob, Looking Right Through You, Crosswalk.com, Christianity Today International, January 1, 1997. George B. Kauffman, 2003 Nobel Prize for MRI Denied to Raymond Vahan Damadian, The Armenian Weekly, November 7, 2013
He met his future wife, Donna Terry, while he had a job as a tennis coach. She invited him to the 1957 Billy Graham crusade at Madison Square Garden, and he responded to the altar call. Raymond and Donna married a year after he finished medical school, and they had three children. Raymond said that he first became interested in detecting cancer when, as a boy of 10, he saw his maternal grandmother, with whom he was very close, die painfully of breast cancer.
Magnetic resonance imaging
Damadian's early work on NMR concerned investigating potassium ions inside cells.Cope, F. and Damadian, R., "Cell potassium by 39K spin echo nuclear magnetic resonance", Nature 228(5266):76–77, October 3, 1970 | doi:10.1038/228076a0. He found that the potassium relaxation times were much shorter compared with aqueous solutions of potassium ions. This suggested that potassium was not free but complexed to 'fixed-charge' counter-ions, as he had previously determined.Damadian, R., "Ion Exchange in Escherichia coli: Potassium-Binding Proteins", Science 165(3888):79–81, July 4, 1969 | doi:10.1126/science.165.3888.79.
He and other researchers independently investigated the signals of 1H NMR in cells, and found that the relaxation times were much shorter than in distilled water. This was consistent with ordering of a large part of the water by adsorption onto macromolecular surfaces. Damadian predicted that cancerous cells would have longer relaxation times, both because of the disordering of malignant cells and because of their elevated potassium levels, since the potassium ions would be 'structure-breaking' to the ordered water fraction.
In a 1971 paper in the journal Science,Damadian, R. V. "Tumor Detection by Nuclear Magnetic Resonance", Science 171(3976):1151–1153, March 19, 1971 | doi:10.1126/science.171.3976.1151. SUNY Downstate Medical Center professor Damadian reported that tumors can be detected in vivo by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) because of much longer relaxation times than normal tissue. He suggested that these differences could be used to detect cancer, even in the early stages where it would be most treatable, though later research would find that these differences, while real, are too variable for diagnostic purposes. However, Damadian in his seminal paper claimed only that his method was a detection tool, making no claim about being a diagnostic tool, but intended that it would provide a non-invasive way of detecting cancers and monitoring the effectiveness of their therapy.
In 1974, he received the first patent in the field of MRI when he patented the concept of NMR for detecting cancer after filing an application in 1972. As the National Science Foundation notes, "The patent included the idea of using NMR to 'scan' the human body to locate cancerous tissue."NSF history However, it did not describe a method for generating pictures from such a scan or precisely how such a scan might be done. However, Damadian's recognition that NMR relaxation time can be used to distinguish different tissue types and malignant tissue is what gives MRI its contrast to tissue types.
In the 1950s, Herman Carr reported Physics Today July 2004 – Field Gradients in Early MRI creating a one-dimensional magnetic resonance (MR) image. Prompted by Damadian's report on the potential medical uses of NMR, Paul Lauterbur expanded on Carr's technique and developed a way to generate the first MRI images, in 2D and 3D, using gradients. Peter Mansfield from the University of Nottingham then developed a mathematical technique that would allow scans to take seconds rather than hours and produce clearer images than Lauterbur had. While Lauterbur and Mansfield focused on animals and human limbs, Damadian built the first full-body MRI machine and produced the first full magnetic resonance imaging ("MRI") scan of the human body, albeit using a "focused field" technique that differs considerably from modern imaging.
According to a Wall Street Journal article, Damadian's initial methods were flawed for practical use, relying on a point-by-point scan of the entire body and using relaxation rates, which turned out to not be an effective indicator of cancerous tissue. However, the same article pointed out, "Nevertheless, his observation of T1 and T2 differences in cancerous tissue was a Eureka moment for Paul Lauterbur." Furthermore, Damadian's seminal paper documented in its Table 2 that T1 relaxation times were different, beyond experimental uncertainty, across all his samples over different healthy tissues: rectus muscle, liver, stomach, small intestine, kidney, and brain. This showed the way to accurate imaging of the body's soft tissues for the first time; X-ray imaging was severely deficient for soft tissue analysis because the difference in absorption was so small (<4%). So when in the court case Fonar v. General Electric, GE's attorneys made the same claim that relaxations times were also prolonged in non-cancerous tissue, so were not a good diagnostic, Fonar's attorneys responded that it was unfair to punish Damadian because his methods detected even more features than he had intended. Indeed, even today, 90% of MRI scans on patients produce images that are relaxation dependent, either T1- or T2-dependent images.
First human MRI body scan On July 3, 1977, the first MRI body exam was performed on a human beingDamadian R. V., Goldsmith M., and Minkoff L., "NMR in cancer: XVI. FONAR image of the live human body", Physiol. Chem. Phys. 9(1):97–100, 1977. (the first human scan was performed by Peter Mansfield's team in Nottingham a year earlier, on fellow author Andrew Maudsley's finger). It took almost five hours to produce one image: a 106-voxel point-by-point scan of Larry Minkoff's thorax. The images were rudimentary by modern standards. Damadian, along with colleagues Larry Minkoff and Michael Goldsmith took seven years to reach this point. They named their original machine "Indomitable" to capture the spirit of their struggle to do what many said could not be done, though no systems would ever use Damadian's method. His technique of imaging was never made into a practically usable method and has therefore never been used in MR imaging as we know it today.
His patent followed on the heels of rumors already floating throughout the scientific community of Lauterbur's proposed idea of using NMR in vivo (still in the human body, an imaging device). However, in 1969, Damadian had previously proposed NMR as a method for external scanning of internal cancers in the body, i.e. in vivo:
I am very much interested in the potential of NMR spectroscopy for early non-destructive detection of internal malignancies. … I will make every effort myself, and through collaborators, to establish that all tumors can be recognized by their potassium relaxation times or H2O-proton spectra and proceed with the development of instrumentation and probes that can be used to scan the human body externally for early signs of malignancy. Detection of internal tumors during the earliest states of their genesis should bring us very close to the total eradication of the disease.Damadian, R., 1969, September 17. Letter to George. S. Mirick, Scientific Director, The Health Research Council of the City of New York, Department of Health."
Though it would later turn out to be irreproducible, in his 1971 Science paper, Damadian showed different NMR signals for tumors and different tissue types:
In principle, nuclear magnetic resonance [NMR] techniques combine many of the desirable features of an external probe for the detection of internal cancer.
This was clearly influential, as Lauterbur wrote in 1986:
… the attention of the medical community was first attracted by the report of Damadian that some animal tumors have remarkably long water proton relaxation times. … even long normal tissues differed markedly among themselves in NMR relaxation times, and I wondered whether there might be some way to noninvasively map out such quantities within the body.Lauterbur, P. C. "Cancer detection by Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Zeugmatographic Imaging", Cancer 57:1899–1904, May 15, 1986 | doi:10.1002/1097-0142(19860515)57:10<1899::AID-CNCR2820571002>3.0.CO;2-4.
Thus it was the discovery of strongly variant relaxation times that led to Lauterbur's quest to represent these relaxation time differences graphically. Without these differences, unknown until Damadian's work, there would be nothing to make an image with. Hence a book on MRI history, which included chapters on both Damadian and Lauterbur, Chapter 8 entitled, "Raymond V. Damadian: Originator of the Concept of Whole-Body NMR Scanning (MRI) and Discoverer of the NMR Tissue Relaxation Differences That Made It Possible."Mattson, J. and Simon, M., The Pioneers of NMR and Magnetic Resonance in Medicine: The Story of MRI, Bar-Ilan University Press, Jericho, New York, 1996. The book pointed out the importance of both men:
Because of the contributions of Dr. Raymond Damadian and Dr. Paul Lauterbur, magnetic resonance imaging has become the most powerful and reliable diagnostic tool in medicine.... Millions of people the world over enjoy a higher quality of life and many lives have been saved, thanks to the contributions of Damadian and Lauterbur.