[Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine in 2003 awarded to the fathers of magnetic resonance imaging].

The 2003 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to the American physical chemist Paul Lauterbur (1929) and the British physicist Peter Mansfield (1933) for their discoveries in the field of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Lauterbur devised a method to encode the nuclear magnetic resonance relaxation information in an object spatially and to reproduce it as an image. Mansfield succeeded in exciting a slice perpendicular to the gradient direction, which enabled him to define a third dimension directly. In addition, he developed methods to enhance the speed of imaging. A third scientist, the physician Raymond Damadian, although equally a pioneer in the field of MRI, was--disputably--not a laureate.