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.
Atkinson Morley Hospital
In 1967 an electronics engineer from EMI, Godfrey Hounsfield, visited consultant radiologist Jamie Ambrose to discuss a new method of using x-rays to image the brain. Although Hounsfield had been dismissed as a crank by a neuroradiologist at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Ambrose and other staff thought the proposal was interesting. Ambrose gave him a bottled brain tumour sample to see if he could make good on his claim that "I can do better" than their state-of-the-art x-ray and ultrasound images. When Hounsfield returned five weeks later with a detailed image of the tumour, Ambrose was convinced and encouraged the Department of Health to fund the building of a prototype scanner. Hospital staff were sworn to secrecy while the first tomographic scanner to allow computed tomographic images of a live patient's brain was constructed and tested in the basement. On 1 October 1971 the first patient was scanned and the data sent off for analysis. The resulting images were examined by the hospital's neuroradiologists, neurologists and neurosurgeons who immediately appreciated their value. There was international media interest and hundreds of clinicians visited the hospital to see the new scanner. Hounsfield shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with the physicist Allan M. Cormack "for the development of computer assisted tomography".