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.
Magnetic resonance imaging
In 1971, Paul Lauterbur applied magnetic field gradients in all three dimensions and a back-projection technique to create NMR images. He published the first images of two tubes of water in 1973 in the journal "Nature", followed by the picture of a living animal, a clam, and in 1974 by the image of the thoracic cavity of a mouse. Lauterbur called his imaging method zeugmatography, a term which was later replaced by (N)MR imaging. In the late 1970s, physicists Peter Mansfield and Paul Lauterbur, developed MRI-related techniques, like the echo-planar imaging (EPI) technique. Mansfield and Lauterbur were awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their "discoveries concerning magnetic resonance imaging".