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Re: Self-taught scientist created CAT scan
Hounsfield's Nobel acceptance presentation can be
found at
http://www.nobel.se/medicine/laureates/1979/hounsfield-lecture.pdf
An interesting side-light is that the company
Hounsfiedl worked for, EMI, made their money from the
sale and distribution of Beatles music.
--- Jaro <jaro-10kbq@sympatico.ca> wrote:
>
http://www.canada.com/montreal/montrealgazette/news/story.html?id=f186e4c5-2
> d4b-4b22-b672-2ec20c1dd33e
> 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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=====
+++++++++++++++++++
"Everyone is ignorant, only on different subjects."
Will Rogers
-- John
John Jacobus, MS
Certified Health Physicist
e-mail: crispy_bird@yahoo.com
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