Image Processing and Acquisition using Python

Chapter 11

Magnetic Resonance Imaging

11.1 Introduction

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is built on the same physical principle as Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR), which was first described by Dr. Isidor Rabi in 1938 and for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1944. In 1952, Felix Bloch and Edward Purcell won the Nobel Prize in Physics for demonstrating the use of NMR technique in various materials.

It took a few more decades to apply the NMR principle to imaging the human body. Paul Lauterbur developed the first MRI machine that generated 2D images. Peter Mansfield expanded on Paul Lauterbur’s work and developed mathematical techniques that are still part of MRI image creation. For their work, Peter Mansfield and Paul Lauterbur ...