28 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • DECEMBER 2017 28 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • SEPTEMBER 2017 28 LONGISLANDPRESS.CO M • SEPTEMBER 201-----------TUTU111
An internist first in sight
By JESS WINANS
Dr. Raymond Damadian was 10
years old when he watched his
grandmother die of breast cancer,
but he turned the negative into a
positive like few others.
It was then that he made detecting
cancer his life’s work, founded
Melville-based Fonar Corporation
and invented the Magnetic Resonance
Imaging (MRI) scanner in
the 1970s. Ten years ago, Damadian,
now 81, improved upon his
invention when he introduced the
stand-up MRI machine.
“Without Damadian’s discovery,
it could not be known that serious
diseases like cancer could be detected
by an NMR nuclear magnetic
resonance, the prior term used
for the MRI scanner,” said James
Mattson, author of The Pioneers of
NMR and Magnetic Resonance in
Medicine: The Story of MRI. “Or
that tissue NMR signals possessed
sufficient contract to create medically
useful images.”
Damadian also operates his own
MRI scanning office, Stand-up MRI
of Melville, P.C., as an internist on
Long Island.
But Damadian didn’t always study
medicine. He originally studied math
and science as a violin student at
Juilliard School of Music when he was
15. After graduating with a degree in
mathematics, he went to the Albert
Einstein College of Medicine, where
he received his medical degree.
Then, in 1971 Damadian invented
the MRI as a professor at the SUNY
Downstate Medical Center. He was
using NMR technologies to study
halophiles, a form of bacteria and
potassium ions in cells. He realized
that this technology could be used
to determine differences in cells.
Damadian then tried using the
same technology on human tissues
and realized that there was a significant
difference in the magnetic
signals sent between normal tissues
and cancerous ones.
Subsequently, on July 3, 1977, the
first MRI body scan was conducted
on a human. It took five hours to
produce one image of the patient.
After the scan, Damadian and his
partner, Dr. Michael Goldsmith,
named the machine “Indomitable,”
a reference to their struggle to
develop the technology.
Damadian has since racked up honors
for the discovery. But in 2003, the
Nobel Prize for the MRI went to Paul
Lauterbur, a professor of chemistry at
Stony Brook University, and another
scientist. The debate over who invented
the MRI first is unsettled.
WHOLLY MOLI
Dr. Raymond Damadian performed
the first human MRI scan in 1977
on this early prototype, now on display
in the Hall of Medical Sciences
at the Smithsonian Institution.
Raymond Damadian, father of the MRI
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