Raymond V. Damadian Files the First Patent for MRI

3/17/1972

On March 17, 1972 Armenian-American medical practitioner and inventor Raymond V. Damadian filed a patent for "An Apparatus and Method for Detecting Cancer in Tissue."

Damadian's patent 3,789,832 was granted on February 5, 1974. This was the first patent on the use of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance for scanning the human body, but it did not describe a method for generating pictures from such a scan, or precisely how such a scan might be achieved.

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