New medical imaging modality arises from hard work, inspiration

August 1, 2008 Diagnostic Imaging. New medical imaging modality arises from hard work, inspiration BY JAMES BRICE, SENIOR EDITOR -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This month's cover story ("MR elastography inspires new wave of hepatic imaging," page 20) is devoted to a rare event: the birth of a new imaging modality. MR elastography is a wonder of human ingenuity that employs MRI, a modality that itself still seems like a miracle. Few physicians and scientists could have imagined in the era of Drs. Jonas Salk and Michael DeBakey what it would be like to noninvasively examine the human body with the detail that MRI brings. The basic concept of elastography is easy to fathom. The idea that different substances have different elastic properties is understandable to any child who has shaken a bowl of fruit suspended in gelatin. But exploring this concept was more than an intellectual exercise for Dr. Richard Ehman. From the start in the early 1990s, Ehman, the inventor of at least 30 imaging-related devices, aimed at developing an MR technique that could quantify and image the mechanical properties of tissues.

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