Raymond Damadian

Lore & Background

Raymond Vahan Damadian was born in New York City to an Armenian family. His father Vahan was a photoengraver who had immigrated from what is now Turkey, while his mother Odette was an accountant. He earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1956 and an M.D. from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1960. He studied violin at Juilliard for eight years and played in Junior Davis Cup tennis competitions. He met his future wife, Donna Terry, while working as a tennis coach; they married a year after he finished medical school and had three children. Damadian said he first became interested in detecting cancer when, as a boy of 10, he saw his maternal grandmother die painfully of breast cancer.

Damadian's early work on NMR concerned investigating potassium ions inside cells. He found that potassium relaxation times were much shorter compared with aqueous solutions, suggesting potassium was complexed to fixed-charge counter-ions. He and other researchers independently investigated 1H NMR signals in cells and found relaxation times much shorter than in distilled water. Damadian predicted that cancerous cells would have longer relaxation times due to disordering and elevated potassium levels. In a 1971 paper in Science, he reported that tumors can be detected in vivo by NMR because of much longer relaxation times than normal tissue. He filed a patent in 1972 and received the first patent in the field of MRI in 1974, covering the concept of using NMR to scan the human body to locate cancerous tissue.

On July 3, 1977, Damadian, along with colleagues Larry Minkoff and Michael Goldsmith, performed the first MRI body exam on a human being—a 106-voxel point-by-point scan of Larry Minkoff's thorax that took almost five hours. They named their original machine 'Indomitable.' Damadian's technique of imaging was never made into a practically usable method and has never been used in MR imaging as it is known today.

Reader's Guide

Raymond Damadian's significance lies in his foundational contributions to magnetic resonance imaging. His 1971 paper in Science demonstrated that tumors and normal tissue could be distinguished by their NMR relaxation times, a finding that gave MRI its contrast between tissue types. He was the first to propose an MR body scanner in 1969 and the first to perform a full-body scan of a human in 1977. Although his specific imaging method was not adopted for practical use, his recognition that T1 and T2 relaxation times differ across healthy tissues and between normal and malignant tissue paved the way for soft-tissue imaging, which X-ray imaging could not achieve. His patent, filed in 1972 and granted in 1974, was the first in the MRI field. Damadian received the National Medal of Technology in 1988 and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1989. The article notes that his initial methods were flawed for practical use and that his relaxation-time differences were later found too variable for diagnostic purposes, yet 90% of MRI scans today produce relaxation-dependent images. His work influenced Paul Lauterbur, who developed a method for generating 2D and 3D MRI images using gradients. Damadian also collaborated with Wilson Greatbach to develop an MRI-compatible pacemaker.

Did You Know?

• Damadian studied the violin at Juilliard for eight years and played in Junior Davis Cup tennis competitions.
• He named his original MRI machine 'Indomitable' to capture the spirit of their struggle to do what many said could not be done.
• The first MRI body exam on a human took almost five hours to produce one 106-voxel image.
• Damadian received the National Medal of Technology in 1988 and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1989.