Raymond Damadian

Raymond Vahan Damadian (March 16, 1936 – August 3, 2022) was an American physician, medical practitioner, and inventor of the first nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) scanning machine.

In the 1950s, Herman Carr reported 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 (

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.

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.

Damadian's early work on NMR concerned investigating potassium ions inside cells.

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.

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.

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).

In a 1971 paper in the journal Science, 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."

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.

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).

Damadian received several prizes.

He received a National Medal of Technology in 1988 and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1989.

Raymond Vahan Damadian (Ռայմոնտ Վահան Տամատեան) 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.

In 2001, the Lemelson-MIT Prize Program bestowed its $100,000 Lifetime Achievement Award on 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.

He was also named Knights of Vartan 2003 "Man of the Year".