Sir Godfrey Newbold Hounsfield was a Nobel Prize winner who
played a role in developing the CT scan.
Hounsfield was born in England on August 28, 1919. By age 18 he was actively working on his own
projects including electrical recording machines, a glider, and water jet
propelling. He joined the Royal Air Force
before WWII and learned more about electronics and radar. Hounsfield took many
examinations related to radar and radio communications. Following the war he attended Faraday
Electrical Engineering College.
In 1951 Hounsfield joined EMI to work on radar and guided
weapons. He was an early adopter of
computers and
designed storage for them.
He was involved in the design of the first all-transistor computer constructed
in Britain in 1958. It was called the EMIDEC 1100.
By 1967 Hounsfield was working on automatic pattern
recognition and X-ray computed tomography (CT).
He realized that the contents of a box could be visualized using x-rays
from all angles. A computer could
generate similar images from all angles displayed in "slices."
Hounsfield tested out early scanners on the brains of
deceased humans and cattle. In the early
days it took nine days to acquire the data and 2.5 hours to reconstruct the
image on a computer. Using X-ray tubes
instead of gamma ray sources reduced scanning time to nine hours. A whole-body scanner was eventually
developed in addition to the brain scanner.
The first successful CT scan in medical practice occurred on October 1,
1971; a full-body scanner was built in 1975.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to
Hounsfield and American physicist Allan Cormack in 1979. Cormack had developed the same technology a
few years earlier but lacked financial backing. The honors were debated in scientific circles
because despite the fact that use of the technology continued to grow, neither
man had a degree in medicine or biology.
The Hounsfield scale was named after him and is used as a quantitative
measure of radio density in CT scans. He
was knighted in 1981 and died on August 12, 2004.
Bonus Trivia: CT scan technology was largely funded by the
success of the Beatles, who recorded under the EMI label.
Resources: NNDB - Godfrey N. Hounsfield;
The
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1979; Radiology - Sir Godfrey
Hounsfield; Wikipedia
- Godfrey Hounsfield; image
| 
Re: Godfrey Hounsfield: Changed Medical Diagnostics with the CT Scan
