Sir Peter Mansfield

Sir Peter Mansfield

Hello readers, today I will speak about the English physicist Sir Peter Mansfield, who was awarded with the Nobel prize of physiology or medicine in 2003 for the discoveries concerning magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Firstly I will speak about him and later I will explain the advantages that his discovery brought. 

The childhood of Peter wasn't easy because he was born during the 2nd World War, but, I won't speak about that, I want to explain his career. At the age of 18, having developed an interest in rocketry, Mansfield took up a job with the Rocket Propulsion Department of the Ministry of Supply in Westcott, Buckinghamshire. Eighteen months later he was called up for National Service.

After serving in the army for two years, Mansfield returned to Westcott and started studying for A-levels at night school. Two years later he gained entrance to study physics at Queen Mary College, London. Mansfield graduated with a BSc from Queen Mary's in 1959. Mansfield's project was to build a pulsed NMR spectrometer to study solid polymer systems. In 1962; his thesis was titled Proton magnetic resonance relaxation in solids by transient methods.

In 1964 he returned to England to take up a place as a Lecturer at Nottingham University where he could continue his studies in multiple-pulse NMR.
It was not until the 1970s with Lauterbur's and Mansfield's developments that NMR could be used to produce images of the body. In 1990 Mansfield was appointed Professor of the Department of Physics until his retirement in 1994.

One year before, in 1993 he was knighted, so he would be called "sir".


After explaining all the thing that Mansfield has done all along his career, now I will speak about his most important achievement, the MRI.

MR

The Magnetic resonance imaging or MRI is a medical imaging technique used in radiology to investigate the anatomy and function of the body in both health and disease. The technique is widely used in hospitals for medical diagnosis, staging of disease and for follow-up without exposure to ionising radiation. Mansfield is credited with showing how the radio signals from MRI can be mathematically analysed, making interpretation of the signals into a useful image a possibility. Thanks to Mansfield nowadays MRI is a very helpful instrument for finding neurological cancers, it is also used for finding diseases in different organs...It is such important that more than 60 million MRIs are made annually.

The MRI gives a good image of the organ we are looking, so if there's something strange we can see it easily. It is normally used for looking peoples' brain,the look doctors look to the image and see if there is any tumour or something strange.

But the MRI also has negative things, for example the safety of the MRI the first three months of pregnancy is uncertain but it may be better than alternative options. The sustained increase in demand within the health care industry for MRI has led to concerns about cost effectiveness and overdiagnosis (diseases caused by some diagnosis).

As a conclusion, we can say that Sir Peter Mansfield had a great career, and that his discovery has made medicine easier, it is true that some people think MRI can be dangerous but, so many things can be dangerous. The MRI is a finding that saves lifes, so ¿does it really matter?