Melville-based Fonar Corp. has just celebrated the 50th anniversary of its founder’s first conceiving of the use of magnetic resonance imaging to detect cancer, an idea that would revolutionize medicine.
Fonar CEO Dr. Raymond Damadian 50 years ago “first thought about developing a device using magnetic resonance to scan the human body to detect cancer,” the company said.
While MRIs today are widely seen as a medical device, the imaging technology at the time was simply used to create rudimentary images. Only the medical application made it a valuable, useful tool that could save lives.
On September 17, 1969, Damadian sent a letter to Dr. George Mirick of the Health Research Council of the City of New York requesting financial support for equipment to follow up on what he viewed as “his promising” line of research.
“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,” Damadian wrote, “and proceed with the development of instrumentation and probes that can be used to scan the human body externally for early signs of malignancy.”
He went to outline what his device, and what the MRI, would do, laying the foundations for what would become an industry. To get a more detailed view of Fonar’s and the history of the MRI, click here.
“Detection of internal tumors during the earliest stages of their genesis should bring us very close to the total eradication of this disease,” Damadian wrote in a letter that would envision the MRI scanner.
Dr. Raymond’s letter includes references to the technology that would help transform medicine.
Damarian on June 18, 1970, in experiments discovered the distinctly differences between normal and cancerous tissue, as well as differences among various normal organs themselves that make the MRI possible as a medical device.
“That was my ‘Eureka!’ moment,” Dr. Damadian said.
The results of his experiments were subsequently published in the Science on March 19, 1971. Damadian filed for patents in 1972. He went on to found Fonar in 1978 and began making MRI devices.
The company introduced the world’s first commercial MRI in 1980 and went public in 1981. Its signature product today is the Upright Multi-Position MRI. Thousands of MRI scanners today scan millions of patients every year all over the world.
Fonar’s device allows scans to be done in different positions, including standing up.
According to December 4, 2003 issue of The Economist, roughly 22,000 MRI machines around the world were used in 60 million examinations in 2002.
Professor Donlin Long, a medical doctor and former chairman of Neurosurgery, at Johns Hopkins University, called the MRI “the single most important diagnostic discovery in the history of all of medicine.”
He made that statement on November 10, 2018, when Dr. Damadian was awarded the Excellence in Medicine Medal of Honor from the Chiari & Syringomyelia Foundation at Brooks’s in London.
