- How did the photograph of Anna Röntgen's hand change how people understood the inside of the human body?
Medical Imaging
Technologies for visualizing the interior of the body.
- What disease was Niels Finsen trying to treat with concentrated ultraviolet light?
- How did Finsen's own illness shape his interest in the biological effects of sunlight?
- Why did the Nobel committee treat Finsen's work as establishing a general principle rather than just a local remedy?
- What modern medical treatments trace their lineage back to Finsen's phototherapy?
- What modern applications, from carbon-14 dating to PET scans, rely on the distinction Soddy formalized?
- What fields of science and technology trace their origins to Röntgen's accidental 1895 discovery?
- Where does the positron show up in medicine today, decades after Dirac's theoretical prediction?
- What is the connection between Rabi's resonance technique and the invention of MRI decades later?
- Why was nuclear magnetic resonance renamed 'MRI' for clinical use?
- How does the retina's edge-sharpening mechanism resemble the sharpening filters used in modern photo editing?
- How does computed tomography reconstruct a slice-by-slice map of the body's interior from X-rays?
- How were doctors able to image the interior of a living skull before CT scanners existed?
- Why did Godfrey Hounsfield decline to patent his CT reconstruction algorithms?
- What role did William Oldendorf play in developing the theory behind CT scanning?
- Why is MRI able to reveal tumours, strokes, and torn ligaments that X-rays and CT scans cannot?
- How did Hounsfield's idea of combining many X-ray angles produce a cross-sectional image?
- Where and when was the first clinical CT scanner installed, and what did it reveal?
- How did Cormack's mathematics anticipate Hounsfield's engineering without either knowing of the other?
- What could doctors diagnose after CT scanning that they couldn't diagnose with plain X-rays?
- What technical challenges did researchers face imaging inside an MRI scanner bore?
- Why was nuclear magnetic resonance useless for imaging before Paul Lauterbur's 1973 insight?
- How many MRI scans are performed worldwide each year as a result of this work?
- Why does the speed of ultrasound through cheddar cheese reveal information about its ripeness?
- How does temperature affect the speed of sound traveling through cheese?
- Why is a non-destructive method for assessing cheese ripeness useful to the food industry?
- How did researchers measure whether a fetus responded more strongly to internally placed sound?
- What did the response of mouth and tongue movements on ultrasound indicate about fetal hearing?
- How does optical coherence tomography use interfering light echoes to image tissue structure?