About the session
Since Roentgen's discovery of X-rays in 1895, virtually every conceivable energy source has been used to probe and image the inside of the human body. A review of the historical development of two of the most commonly used imaging techniques, X-ray computed tomography (CT) and diagnostic ultrasound, shows that many of the principles of physics on which these are based are very old. It has been engineering developments which have driven progress in medical imaging. The information content of CT and ultrasound scans has doubled every three years since their invention. The speaker's first CT scanner took 27 seconds to acquire data for a single slice. The latest scanners are 25,000 times faster.
