Fonar Corp. v. General Electric Co.
"Fonar" was a dispute between medical device manufacturer Fonar Corporation and General Electric over Fonar's patent on MRI technology. Fonar's founder, Raymond Damadian, was issued U.S. Patent 3,789,832 (priority date 1972-03-17) for an "apparatus and method for detecting cancer in tissue" using the magnetic resonance of atoms. Damadian's patent was the first patent on an MRI machine issued in the United States. Also at issue was a later patent, U.S. Patent 4,871,966 issued in 1989, covering a method for obtaining MRI images of multiple planes at different orientations in a single scan. GE is a major manufacturer of MRI scanners, and Fonar sued GE for infringing these patents by producing its scanners as well as inducing others to infringe.
Surface nuclear magnetic resonance
The MRS technique was originally conceived in the 1960s by Russell H. Varian, one of the inventors of the proton magnetometer. SNMR is a product of a joint effort by many scientists and engineers who started developing this method in the USSR under the guidance of A.G. Semenov and continued this work all over the world. Semenov’s team used nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) for non-invasive detection of proton-containing liquids (hydrocarbons or water) in the subsurface. The Institute of Chemical Kinetics and Combustion (ICKC) of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences fabricated the first version of the instrument for measurements of magnetic resonance signals from subsurface water ("hydroscope") in 1981.