Sir Peter Mansfield obituary

Physicist awarded the Nobel prize for his work as the inventor and main architect of the revolutionary MRI scanner

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is familiar to us all, and with some 36,000 scanners and 100m scans undertaken annually, it is hard to imagine a world without it. Yet it is only 40 years since the development of the MRI scanner, which revealed internal human anatomy in exquisite detail and revolutionised diagnostic medicine. Sir Peter Mansfield, who has died aged 83, was its inventor and principal architect.

MRI uses the magnetic properties of hydrogen nuclei and in particular, those found in the water molecules that constitute more than half of our bodyweight. In a magnetic field they have two possible states, parallel and opposed to the magnetic field. A radiofrequency field precisely tuned to the energy difference between them will induce a transition (resonance). Mansfield realised that, in a magnetic field gradient, the resonance frequency would correspond to position, enabling an image to be generated.

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