Something as big as MRI will have a number of individuals clamoring to get all the credit. AFAIK, Lauterber made the first image. Richard Ernst received a Nobel for MRI related transformation work. Damadian contributed to the field and others did as well. Such "inventions" are never attributable to one single individual. Before images could be produced, others laid the ground work. NMR had been around for a while before medical applications were found.
The New Yorker, that leftist rag, which I read every week, carried an interesting article last summer on the invention of the TV; who got the credit, who did the work, who did the marketing, who really made it happen. They are not all the same person.
My husband, who now does his research in MR physics, started out in PET. If you look at the web pages of any of the people first involved in PET, you'll see each of them claiming the invention for himself.