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."
Saint Boniface Hospital
The Dr. Andrei Sakharov Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) Facility, the first of its kind in Manitoba, has three MRI scanners. The facility allows radiologists to diagnose abnormalities of the brain, spinal cord, internal organs and joints. St. Boniface Hospital Research Centre is a recognized leader in the MRI field and has one of the largest MRI research facilities in Canada. An MRI was first installed at St. Boniface in 1990; this MRI was eventually replaced by a more modern version, which is primarily used for clinical purposes. The other two MRIs are research-oriented: they are an interventional scanner and a head-only functional unit. The clinical scanner enables the Centre to do echo-planar imaging, producing images at video rates; the interventional MRI gives physicians access to the patient during imaging, which supports research into robotics-guided laser surgery. Research carried out at the centre has been published in the "Journal of Magnetic Resonance Imaging".