Raymond Damadian
Damadian received a National Medal of Technology in 1988 and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1989. His original MRI full-body scanner was given to the Smithsonian Institution in the 1980s and is now on loan and on display at the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Ohio. In 2001, the Lemelson-MIT Prize Program bestowed its $100,000 Lifetime Achievement Award on Damadian as "the man who invented the MRI scanner."
Kenneth Kwong
Upon joining the team at the MGH Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (MGH-NMR) Center, Kwong pursued an interest in perfusion (the distribution of blood an nutrients to tissue) and diffusion (the detection of random dispersion of particles, principally water) in living tissues. Together with MIT graduate student Daisy Chien, and colleagues Richard Buxton, Tom Brady and Bruce Rosen he was one of the earliest entrants in the field of brain diffusion imaging, which itself was opened by the pioneering experiments of Denis Le Bihan. In a conference paper in 1988 at the Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine the MGH group was the first to demonstrate diffusion anisotropy in the human brain, stating, "... "we observed different diffusion patterns parallel and perpendicular to the midline of the brain, which was repeatable, and depended only on the direction of diffusion encoding gradient relative to the brain, regardless of which physical gradient was used".". This anisotropy itself is the fundamental principle underlying the modern method of MRI tractography and structural connectomics (the "in vivo" visualization the axonal fibers that connect neurons in the brain) . Chien and Kwong then used their early diffusion techniques to study human patients with stroke. In technically demanding circumstances (a low field MRI using conventional imaging, located in a parking lot trailer nearby the MGH) they were the first to demonstrate in human subjects the early drop in diffusivity seen in acute infarction in cats by Moseley.