History: A. M. Cormack, CT scan pioneer

[Mike Grissom <mikeg@SLAC.Stanford.EDU>]

Radsafers,

This is an old obituary that appeared in the May 9, 1998
edition of the San Jose Mercury News, but is of special
interest to Medical HPs and medical physicists:

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         A. M. Cormack, CT scan pioneer

He and a British researcher independently
developed the technology

Boston Globe

Allan MacLeod Cormack, a "modest genius" whose "hobby"
of research on X-ray tomography led to the development
of the CT scan and a Nobel Prize for medicine, died
Thursday at his home in Winchester, Massachusetts [USA].
He was 74.

Mr. Cormack was a professor of physics at Tufts University
from 1957 until his retirement in 1995. Colleagues
described him as a modest man who was as happy dawdling
over dinner in the faculty dining room discussing the
news of the day as he was in his research lab wrestling
with arcane mathematics. Friday, Sol Gittleman, provost
of the school, described him as a "modest genius."

On September 30, 1979, when it was announced that he
won the Nobel Prize, which was awarded jointly to Godfrey
Newbold Hounsfield, a British medical researcher, Mr.
Cormack said he conducted his research as a "hobby."

"I asked myself, 'how can you accurately deliver a dosage
of radiation to a patient if you can't see the (target)
material,' " he said in an interview published in
the Boston Globe on October 1, 1979. His research, which
he conducted using a Lucite scanner and a model
skull, led to the CT scan system, or computerized
tomography. This involves the X-raying of successive
cross sections of the body to build, with the aid of a
computer, a three-dimensional image.

The Nobel Prize citation read, "It is no exaggeration
to state that no other method with X-ray diagnostics
within such a short period of time has led to such
remarkable advances in research and in a multiple of
applications as computer assisted tomography."

Mr. Cormack and Hounsfield developed the mathematical
basis for the CT scan independently. When they were
awarded the Nobel Prize they had never met. They divided
the $192,000 award.

Mr. Cormack was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. He
earned bachelor's and master's degrees at the University
of Cape Town, where he did research on radioisotopes
before joining the faculty at Tufts.

His work on the CT scan was a sideline, a project he
sandwiched among his duties as a faculty member at
Tufts and a researcher in nuclear physics.

His interest in radiology was cultivated at Groote
Schur Hospital in South Africa while he was a student
at the University of Cape Town.

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