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.
Jens Frahm
Working as a Research Assistant at the Göttingen MPI since 1977 Frahm formed an independent research team which focused on the new possibilities offered by spatially resolved NMR and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) - discovered by Paul Lauterbur in 1974 (Nobel Prize in 2003 for Physiology or Medicine together with Sir Peter Mansfield). In 1982 the Biomedical NMR group was formally founded and from 1984 to 1992 primarily financed via two substantial grants from the Ministry for Research and Technology of the German Federal Government.