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."
Ferenc A. Jolesz
The team, consisting of members of the departments of Radiology and Otorhinolaryngology and the neurosurgical service at BWH and industrial collaborators from General Electric Medical Systems, developed and built an entire operating suite built around a specially-designed 0.5 Tesla MRI scanner that allowed ongoing patient scans to be obtained during a surgical procedure. Information from the scans, including imaging data registered with three-dimensional models created from pre-operative imaging, was available to the surgical team to help guide the procedure. The system became known as MRT (for Magnetic Resonance Therapy) at BWH and commercialized by GE Medical Systems as the GE Signa SP.