Paul C. Lauterbur Ph.D.
Paul C. Lauterbur Ph.D.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2003
Nobel Co-recipient Sir Peter Mansfield
The President’s National Medal of Science – Physical Sciences 1987
The National Medal of Technology and Innovation 1988
Name: Paul Christian Lauaterbur
Birth: 6 May 1929, Sidney, OH, USA
Death: 27 March 2007, Urbana, IL, USA
Institution: University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, USA
Award: “for their discoveries concerning magnetic resonance imaging”
Subject: Diagnostic imaging
Portion of Cash: 1/2
“Every great idea in history has the red stamp of rejection on its face. If you scratch any innovation’s surface, you’ll find the scars: they’ve been roughed up and thrashed around by the masses and the leading minds before they made it into your life.”
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General Nobel Prize Information
Journal Articles
Image Formation by Induced Local Interactions
Examples: Employing Nuclear Magnetic Resonance. Nature 242, 190-191 (1973).
MRI – a new way of seeing
In 1973, Paul Lauterbur described an imaging technique that removed the usual resolution limits due to the wavelength of the imaging field. He used two fields: one interacting with the object under investigation, the other restricting this interaction to a small region. Rotation of the fields relative to the object produces a series of one-dimensional projections of the interacting regions, from which two- or three-dimensional images of their spatial distribution can be reconstructed. Application of this technique as magnetic resonance imaging is now widespread.