Word: scanners
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
They share a Nobel Prize for pioneering the CAT scanner...
...Research Engineer Godfrey Hounsfield, 60, of the British firm EMI Ltd., brooded over the same mathematical puzzle and independently reached the same solution. The puzzle: how to produce an X-ray image of tissue at any depth within a patient. The result: the CAT (for computerized axial tomography) scanner, a medical marvel now used in hospitals round the world. Last week the two scientists learned that they have something else in common: they will share the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and its accompanying cash award...
...overturned after a lengthy debate. Though no rejected names were divulged, the schism was apparently an ideological one: some institute members insisted that winners be confined to scientists engaged in basic research, while others felt that achievements in medical technology should also be considered. The choice of the CAT-scanner pioneers seemed a perfect compromise. Their work with abstract physics and mathematics resulted in a lifesaving machine...
Five years later, Hounsfield attacked the same puzzle for EMI, solved it in much the same way and applied it first to a prototype computerized head scanner, then to a body scanner, both of which EMI patented. These devices were able to distinguish soft tissues and organs and spot abnormalities by producing television images shaded according to the density of the tissue. Since then, widespread use of the scanner has drawn critics who argue that the machine's hefty price-up to $700,000 and more-drives up the cost of medical care at hospitals that could...
Cormack's award is unusual in two respects: he has never received a doctorate in any scientific field and he is primarily concerned not with medicine but with particle physics. He described his work on the CAT scanner as "a hobby...