Mansfield, Sir Peter

Mansfield, Sir Peter, 1933–2017, British physicist, Ph.D. Queen Mary College, London, 1962. He was a professor at the Univ. of Nottingham from 1964 to 1994. In 2003 Mansfield shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with Paul Lauterbur for their joint work on medical applications of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Building on Lauterbur's discovery that gradients in the magnetic field could be used to create a two-dimensional picture, Mansfield demonstrated that a useful imaging technique could be developed through mathematical analysis of the radio signals emitted during the process. He also showed that very rapid imaging was possible, a potential that was realized in medicine ten years later.

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