At the time, all he wanted was to reconstruct a 3D picture of a box. He intended to achieve this by re-imagining the object as a series of slices. Before this happened, though, Hounsfield needed another boost to transition the brain scanner to mainstream medicine. This was where a consultant radiologist from the hospital, named James Ambrose, came in and helped the British engineer to create a prototype that they used to study preserved organs of humans and animals.
The first ever human patient to benefit from the brain scanner was a woman believed to be suffering from a brain tumor. The first doctor to utilize the machine on October 1, , was James Ambrose. The success of the prototype brain scanner at Atkinson Morley Hospital was publicized in By the year , the United States had installed the first CT scanners of their own.
The result is a 3-D image of the body part. A native of South Africa, Cormack became interested in astronomy as a teenager, and chose to study math and physics because they were essential to a career in astronomy.
Career prospects for astronomers weren't good, so he studied electrical engineering instead at the University of Cape Town. Within two years his interests had reverted to math and physics; he eventually earned bachelor's and master's degrees in physics.
He worked at Cambridge University's famed Cavendish Laboratory before returning to his alma mater as a faculty member. Much of his research was in nuclear physics; he became interested in what is now known as CAT-scanning in Cormack provided the theoretical framework for CAT scans, analyzing the conditions for demonstrating a correct radiographic cross-section in a biological system, which was published in two papers in and , respectively.
His results didn't initially garner much attention; it wasn't until that other developments in the field caused him to devote more sub-stantial efforts to that area. Cormack understood that it was basically a matter of finding a two-dimensional mathematical function to relate the observed transmission to the varying absorbtion as the x-rays pass through a cross-section. Although others before him had deduced similar methods of calculation, Cormack was the first to state the basic principles for reconstructing a cross-section of organ tissue.
He also foresaw that solving this problem would open up radiotherapy and imaging diagnostic applications in medicine. Modern CT scanners still operate according to the basic principle thought up by Godfrey Hounsfield — but they are worlds apart from the early devices in terms of technology. Did this information help you? Thank you. And there it was — in her left frontal lobe — a cystic mass about the size of a plum. With that, every other method of imaging the brain was obsolete.
EMI, with no experience in the medical market, suddenly held a monopoly for a machine in high demand. It jumped into production and was initially very successful at selling the scanners. But within five years, bigger, more experienced companies with more research capacity such as GE and Siemens were producing better scanners and gobbling up sales.
EMI eventually exited the medical market — and became a case study in why it can be better to partner with one of the big guys instead of trying to go it alone.
He continued to putter around with inventions until his final days in , when he died at In , American Robert Ledley developed a whole-body scanner that could image other organs, blood vessels and, of course, bones.
Modern scanners are faster, provide better resolution, and most important, do it with less radiation exposure. There are even mobile scanners. By , technicians were performing more than 80 million scans annually in the U. Some physicians argue that number is excessive and maybe a third are unnecessary.
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