Self-taught scientist created CAT scan

["Jaro" <jaro-10kbq@sympatico.ca>]

http://www.canada.com/montreal/montrealgazette/news/story.html?id=f186e4c5-2

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Self-taught scientist created CAT scan

Led British design team. After practising procedure on a cow brain, he

submitted himself in first human trials

The Daily Telegraph

Tuesday, August 17, 2004



Godfrey Hounsfield, who died on August 12 at age 84, led the team that

developed Britain's first big solid-state computer before inventing the

computerized axial tomography (CAT) scanner for use in clinical diagnosis;

in recognition of this latter achievement he was awarded the 1979 Nobel

Prize for Physiology or Medicine.



Hounsfield conceived the idea for a CAT scanner in 1967 during a weekend

ramble in the country. Initially, it had nothing to do with medicine, but

was simply "a realization that you could determine what was in a box by

taking readings at all angles through it.''



On his return to EMI's research laboratories at Hayes, in Middlesex, he

began working on a device that could process hundreds of X-ray beams to

obtain a three-dimensional display of the inside of a living organism.



Combining computer and X-ray technology, and practising "on a brain of a cow

my colleague got from a kosher house on the other side of London'' (he

submitted his own head for the first human trials), by 1972 Hounsfield had

evolved a machine that could produce detailed images of cross-sections of

the brain in four and a half minutes. Introduced in 1973, early CAT scanners

were used to overcome obstacles in the diagnosis of diseases of the brain,

and Hounsfield subsequently modified his machine to enable it to scan the

whole body.



Unknown to Hounsfield, a South African nuclear physicist, Allan Cormack, had

worked on essentially the same problems of CAT, and in a paper published in

1957 had suggested a reconstruction technique called the Radon transform.

Although Cormack's work was not widely circulated, and he and Hounsfield did

not collaborate or even meet, in 1979 both men shared the Nobel Prize in

Physiology or Medicine for the development of computerized tomography.



The invention of the CAT scanner was a remarkable achievement, not least

because of the complex algebraic calculations involved in the computer

programming. Other research teams with larger resources than EMI had already

dismissed such a device as impossible to develop, and one prominent British

scientist remarked Hounsfield's machine used "mathematics I wouldn't pretend

to understand now or at any stage of my career.''



Yet Hounsfield had never been to university and was largely self-taught.



Godfrey Newbold Hounsfield, the youngest of five children of a farmer near

Newark in Nottinghamshire, was born on August 28, 1919. At an early age he

became intrigued by the farm's mechanical and electrical machinery, and by

the age of 11 he had begun to experiment, constructing electrical recording

machines and launching himself off the top of haystacks with a home-made

glider.



At Magnus Grammar School in Newark, he confessed to responding "only to

physics and mathematics with any ease and moderate enthusiasm.'' But as with

so many of Britain's great postwar scientists, his opportunity came with the

outbreak of the Second World War.



There, in his spare time, he passed the City and Guilds examination in Radio

Communications. In 1945, he was awarded the RAF's Certificate of Merit. His

work impressed Air Vice-Marshal J.R. Cassidy, who was responsible for

obtaining a grant for Hounsfield after the war that enabled him to attend

Faraday House Electrical Engineering College in London, where he received a

diploma.



Godfrey Hounsfield was knighted in 1981. He was elected to a fellowship of

the Royal Society in 1975. He was unmarried.



Obituary of Godfrey Hounsfield



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