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."
MRI sequence
Steady-state free precession imaging (SSFP MRI) is an MRI technique which uses steady states of magnetizations. In general, SSFP MRI sequences are based on a (low flip angle) gradient-echo MRI sequence with a short repetition time which in its generic form has been described as the FLASH MRI technique. While spoiled gradient-echo sequences refer to a steady state of the longitudinal magnetization only, SSFP gradient-echo sequences include transverse coherences (magnetizations) from overlapping multi-order spin echoes and stimulated echoes. This is usually accomplished by refocusing the phase-encoding gradient in each repetition interval in order to keep the phase integral (or gradient moment) constant. Fully balanced SSFP MRI sequences achieve a phase of zero by refocusing all imaging gradients.