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.
Kenneth Kwong
With this background, Kwong reasoned that the concepts of functional mapping by brain perfusion, and the assessment of oxygenation from purely endogenous signals could be combined into an entirely new method of studying human brain activity. In the spring of 1991 he performed his first human experiments showing that large MRI signal changes were observable in the human brain following exposure to simple visual stimuli, using both blood oxygenation (BOLD) and flow contrast. The first dynamic video images of human brain activity appeared first at a meeting of the Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine in August 1991 in San Francisco in a plenary session by colleague Tom Brady, and was subsequently published in 1992 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (in the same year that Ogawa and colleagues submitted their results subsequently published a year later in PNAS. That same issue also included the work of Seiji Ogawa, then at Bell Labs, who had made similar findings. Most researchers credit Kwong and Ogawa independently with the discovery of what is now called Functional MRI (fMRI).