We don’t know if the Beatles’ version of “Twist and shout” (Shake it up Baby ) recorded by the Beatles in 1963 inspired English physicists. What we do know is that his EMI Label was enjoying a very healthy economy thanks to the million-dollar sales of the Liverpool group.
You may not know is that EMI was the initials “Electric and Musical Industries” and that, as companies like Google do now, at the time they diversified and invested in “geek” initiatives . Sir Joseph Lockwood, its director, opted for an innovative project by a brilliant employee named Godfrey N. Hounsfield, who proposed to reconstruct perpendicular –axial- images as a result of the information obtained from the shadow produced by 360º X-rays. To do this, he relied on a mathematical model by Allan M. Cormack.
Until then, the X-ray, which had been discovered 75 years earlier, showed the frontal shadows cast by each organ in the human body. These organs covered and “muddied” each other on a photographic plate. The result was very gray and grainy . The source of “light” was an X-ray lamp, which although the human eye cannot see it, it can be seen on a photographic plate.
The first prototype
To place ourselves: there were no microprocessors, only transistors and computers that occupied several rooms. In this context, it must be recognized that that project from 50 years ago proposed several very interesting bets: using electronics as a basis to generate an image , that that image also be processed, and starting from information in 360º.
The result was a prototype developed at EMI Central Research Laboratories, where an X-ray tube rotated and shot (“twist and shot”) and was capable of generating an image of a “slice” or “cut” of the brain without the bones of the skull would cloud or cover the image. It was launched on October 1, 1971 at the Atkinson Morley Hospital in London, it took 20 minutes for each image and was known as CT (Computerized Axial Tomograph). Because of this, in 1979 two non-biologist or medical scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the first time: Godfrey N. Hounsfield and Allan M. Cormack.
With almost half a million devices in the world, today it is an increasingly used equipment in diagnostic imaging, and with the latest generation we need only 1 second to obtain, no longer a cut, but a 3D image of the whole human body! that allows us to navigate virtually inside it. Hence, they have lost the “A” and are called only Computed Tomographs or Scanners . It is one of the most important medical teams in the diagnosis of diseases in history and, perhaps in some way, they carry a grain of the famous group.
José Ramón Román is a Collaborating Professor at the University of Seville in the Faculties of Dentistry and Medicine. Article written in collaboration with the UCC + i of the University of Seville.
