April 2026

Our April meeting was attended by a group of 16 members to hear our guest speaker, Professor Reg Dennick from Park Nottingham u3a, who provided an interesting and entertaining account of the development of the MRI Scanner by Dr Peter Mansfield in Nottingham in the 1970s.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) resulted from the work of many researchers, starting early in the twentieth century, who developed the understanding of the underlying physics that led to magnetic resonance imaging.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, Peter Mansfield at the University of Nottingham further developed the techniques already used in MR image acquisition and processing, and in 2003 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his contribution to the development of the MRI scanner. The first clinical MRI scanners were installed in hospitals in the early 1980s and significant development of the technology has followed in the decades since, leading to its widespread use in medicine today.

Further technologies have emerged since then, including Molecular Resonance Spectroscopy, which can identify the chemicals that are associated with brain activity and with developing cancers before the appearance of a tumour.