William A. Edelstein

Bill Edelstein died late evening on February 10. While sudden, Bill had been dealing with a bout of cancer for the past two years. Even so, he had been working up to the last minute on a project to make quiet MRI gradient systems.

Bill was a former Trustee, Gold Medal winner, and Fellow of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. He was a Fellow of the American Institute of Physics (AIP) and received the AIP prize for Industrial Applications of Physics in 2005. He earned his PhD from Harvard in 1974, and an honorary DSc from the University of Aberdeen in 2007. He was a Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow working on gravitational waves from 1974-1977, but then switched “fields” to join the MRI team at Aberdeen as a Research Fellow from 1977-1980.

Following Paul Lauterbur’s idea of using magnetic field gradients to spatially distinguish NMR signals, the problem of how best to deploy them to make images became central to the development of MRI in the late 1970’s. Ultimately three central ideas held sway: the projection or ‘read-out’ gradient; spatially-selective excitation; and phase-encoding or ‘spin-warp’. Bill Edelstein and the Aberdeen team were responsible for inventing the ‘spin-warp’ method. These techniques dominate MRI technology to this day, and are at its foundation.

Bill left Aberdeen to work as a scientist in GE’s Schenectady NY research laboratories in 1980, on developing an ultra-high field whole-body magnet system. That’s where we first met. The upshot of this was GE’s highly successful 1.5 Tesla whole body MRI scanner, the bird-cage coil, the phased array, the contrast-to-noise ratio, the intrinsic signal-to-noise ratio, and other key contributions to the field made with the Schenectady team.

Bill retired from GE and moved to Baltimore as Visiting Distinguished Professor in 2007, where he worked on quiet MRI, and RF dosimetry. He is survived by his wife Fiona, 2 daughters, a son and 2 grandchildren. He will long be remembered for his critical contributions to the field of MRI. And as a friend.

Paul Bottomley