"This is a landmark issue of the Journal of Computer Assisted Tomography. Contained within its pages are amazing images and technical descriptions of the world's first whole body human clinical magnetic resonance scanner operating at 8 Tesla. Congradulations to Pierre-Marie Robitaille and his co-workers in Radiology and Engineering at The Ohio State University for constructing a device some experts said would be impossible to build. The total stored magnetic energy in this 30,000 kg magnet is a remarkable 81 megajoules. To put this value into perspective, 81 MJoules is the kinetic energy of a 200-metric ton locomotive barreling down the track at 100 km per hour! The human images obtained so far are also astounding (Fig. 1), especially considering that the system has only been operational for a few months and many radio frequency coil and pulse sequence issues remain to be worked out. The Ohio State team has proposed a number of interesting theories concerning susceptibility effects and dielectric resonance phenomena within the human head at 8 Tesla. Some of these theories challenge traditional tenets in MR physics and are admittedly controversial. As more measurements are obtained and experiments are conducted, these theories will be refine, improved, or discarded. Robitaille et. al. have led us to a new frontier in clinical MR imaging. Perhaps one day in the not-so-distant future, 1.5 Tesla will be considered low-field imaging."
A. D. Elster, The Journal of Computer Assisted Tomography 23, 807 (1999).