Crooks, Lawrence E.

Biographical/Historical note

Lawrence E. Crooks was born in Berkeley, California in 1949 and graduated from El Cerrito High School. He received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1971, 1973, and 1978 respectively. From 1972 to 1976 Crooks was a National Institutes of Health Trainee in Bioengineering. . In 1976 he joined the University of California San Francisco Department of Radiology, Nuclear Medicine Section, Experimental Nuclear Instrumentation Group as an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering. He was appointed Associate Professor in 1981, Professor in 1985. Teaching activities included an Introduction to Nuclear Medicine course with medical physicist Leon Kaufmann, lectures on NMR Imaging, a series of Radiology seminars at UCSF, and an IEEE Short Course on NMR Imaging for Physicians and Engineers. He conducted grand rounds in Radiology at UCSF and lectured for Bioengineering students, Visiting Fellows, and Postgraduate Education courses at various UC campuses and Stanford University. In addition to supervising postdoctoral students, he interacted closely with researchers in the neurosciences, cardiovascular research and oncology among others. He has lectured at a wide variety of workshops, short courses, symposia and colloquia to radiology, bioengineering, electrical engineering, physics, and physician groups as well as the U.S Army.

Serving as a Research Fellow for Toshiba America MRI, Inc. from 1994-2001, he developed numerous MRI systems both clinical and experimental. His team designed and debugged a high speed digitizer and digital signal processor to demodulate and filter the MR signal and advised TAMI employees on MR imager design and coordination for the inclusion of digitized RF circuitry in their products. He holds 22 patents on MR imagers for medical applications. A 0.35 Tesla human whole-body imager was in operation from 1981-1990 and in its first three years it scanned over 500 patients, generating over 10,000 images. Later it was devoted to development of advanced imaging techniques.

He collaborated with Principal Research Engineer Mitsuaki Arakawa, John C. Hoenninger, Leon Kaufman and others from RIL on a series of frequently cited journal articles presenting the leading edge of MRI technological, experimental, and clinical research and applications (Davis). Papers presented at scientific meetings and conferences included the 1980 American College of Radiology and FDA Sponsored Conference on New Imaging Modalities, more than ten annual meetings of the Society of Magnetic Resonance, and the Gordon Research Conference on Magnetic Resonance in Medicine and Biology. International conferences have included the Congress of Radiology in Brussels in 1981, World Congress on Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering in Kyoto, and the Mechanical Engineering Laboratory Special Seminar in Tsukuba, Japan.

In addition to the groundbreaking Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Medicine textbook published in 1981, Crooks has co-edited two books and is an author on more than 137 articles on MRI imaging and instrumentation. He has served on the editorial boards of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, Journal of Magnetic Resonance Imaging, American Journal of Roentgenology and Current Concepts in Magnetic Resonance Imaging among others. In the years 1986-1989 he received the Radiology Editor’s Recognition Award with Special Distinction. . Some of the awards and honors bestowed on Dr. Crooks are the Bechtel Achievement Award in 1972, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Centennial Key in 1984 as an outstanding young investigator in the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Group, the Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine’s Gold Medal in 1986, and the John P. Robarts Research Institute’s International Taylor Prize in 1989. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Eta Kappa Nu, Tau Beta Pi, and Sigma Xi and was elected a Fellow of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine in 1997.

As an active member of IEEE, SMRM, and American College of Radiology, his committee responsibilities have included education and training, publications, ethics, and program committees. From 1987-1990 he was a member of the Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine’s Board of Trustees.

Dr. Crooks is currently a Research Specialist affiliated with the UCSF School of Medicine’s Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine and an independent consultant.

Radiologic Imaging Laboratory Background

In the atmosphere of the enormous clinical utility of CT scanning in the 1970s, physicians, scientists, and engineers in American and British corporate and university settings began to devise methods to utilize nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) for scanning the living human body. In 1975 the UCSF Department of Radiology funded a small startup R&D operation involving a handful of engineers and physicists charged with the task of developing MRI as a viable scanning instrument for soft tissues in the human body.

On March 9, 1978 the RIL opened an off campus facility in the Cabot, Cabot and Forbes Industrial Park in South San Francisco with Leon Kaufman as Chief Scientist. In Celebration: 20 Years of Excellence, a 1982 Department of Radiology publication, stated that “it became clear that there was not enough space on campus to accommodate the equipment needed to support a leading instrumentation development effort.” The position of RIL was defined in a 1980 report: “While there are several industrial firms engaged in making diagnostic instrumentation, and there are clinical groups involved in their use as diagnostic tools, one of the unique attributes of RIL is that physicists, engineers, and medical practitioners are all involved directly in the development and evaluation of new diagnostic procedures and instruments.”

Larry Crooks was responsible for the operation and improvement of these systems, interacting with physicians to better understand how pathologies affect the imaging of physical characteristics of tissue. His mission was to create new imaging techniques, hardware, and software to improve image quality, speed, and sensitivity to pathologies and ease of operation. Improvements developed at RIL were installed in over 200 systems provided by the manufacturer. Another research goal was to test the use of low field permanent magnets to expand the availability of MR imaging and to provide an alternate mode to expensive superconducting magnets. Crooks defined a set of performance goals and designed one of the imager subsystems.

RIL had originally received funding from the Pfizer Corporation under an agreement worked out by Radiology Department Chairman Alexander Margulis. Pfizer ordered a human sized superconducting electromagnet from Oxford Instruments. It had triple the field strength of conventional magnets of the time with a homogeneity for imaging. The superior quality of the higher field images triggered a new generation of MRI machines. In 1981 Pfizer discontinued its imaging activities and Diasonics purchased the project, continuing its efforts to develop an MRI system capable of whole body images.

A small 0.35 Tesla scanner in routine operation from 1979-1986 was used in testing imaging of animals, primarily rats, and was replaced by a 0.5 Tesla unit in 1989. “The FDA initially approved MRI’s only for research. In 1985 the FDA decreed MRI machines no longer experimental.” A 0.35 Tesla human whole-body imager scanned over 500 patients in its first three years, generating over 10,000 images. UCSF resident Dr. William Bradley cooperated with RIL to initiate patient studies. In 1989 Toshiba acquired the operation to become Toshiba America MRI (TAMI). Personnel from Toshiba’s Nasu Works in Japan communicated with RIL staff or worked as visiting staff.

From the guide to the Lawrence Crooks Radiologic Imaging Laboratory Records, 1977-2000, (University of California, San Francisco)