Medical Imaging History

            Medical Imaging is a young field.

            In 1895, Wilhelm Roentgen discovered x-rays.

            The primary focus for much of this development has been to improve the quality of the images for humans to evaluate.Only recently has computer technology become

sufficiently sophisticated to assist in the process of diagnosis.

            Early in the twentieth century, a Czech mathematician named Johann Radon dervied a transform for reconstructing corss-sectional information from a series of planar projections taken from around an object, While this powerful theory had been know for overy fifty years, the ability to compute the transform on real data was not possible until digital computers began to mature in 1970s.

           Imaging in 3D emerged in 1972 when x-ray computed tomography(CT) was developed independently by Godfrey Hounsfield and Alan Cormack. These innovators later shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Medicine.

           While techniques for using x-rays in medical imaging were being refined, organic chemists had been exploring the uses of nuclear magnetic resonance(NMR) to analyze chemical samples. Felix Bloch and Edward Purcell were studying NMR in the mid 1940s. Together, they shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1952.