History Of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance ( NMR).

While Isidor Rabi,Felix Bloch,Edward Purcell and other physicists working in this field had laid the foundations, a major discovery that transformed the NMR phenomenon for imaging was not made until 1973, when Paul Lauterbur developed a method for spatially encoding the NMR signal by utilizing linear magnetic field gradients. About the same time, Peter Mansfield had also discovered a means of determining the spatial structure of solids by introducing a linear gradient across the object. The idea of applying magnetic field gradients to induce spatially varying resonance frequencies to resolve the spatial distribution of magnetization was a major milestone and the beginning of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). For their work, Lauterbur and Mansfield were awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2003.  Damadian created the first body picture in 1976. paul lauterbur a nuclear magnetic resonance chemist was working on project at the same time.