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
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).