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.
Robert Turner (scientist)
From 1988 until 1993 he worked as a researcher at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD. Working with Denis le Bihan, a French neuroradiologist, he initially showed that EPI could be used to provide high quality maps of water diffusion in brain tissue, a discovery (known as Diffusion MRI) which has led to the widespread clinical use of MRI in stroke, where water diffusion in the affected brain tissue drops very rapidly after the ischemic event. The technique also lies at the heart of diffusion tensor imaging, a method for non-invasive study of connecting pathways within the brain’s white matter.