Conversation August 8, 2019
It is almost 40 years since a full-body magnetic resonance imaging machine was used for the first time to scan a patient and generate diagnostic-quality images. The scanner and signal processing methodsneeded to produce an image were devised by a team of medical physicists including John Mallard, Jim Hutchinson, Bill Edelstein and Tom Redpath at the University of Aberdeen, leading to widespread use of the MRI scanner, now a ubiquitous tool in radiology departments across the world.
MRI was a game changer in medical diagnostics because it didn’t require exposure to ionising radiation (such as X-rays), and could generate images on multiple cross-sections of the body with superb definition of soft tissues. This allowed, for example, the direct visualisation of...