Contributors to the Evolution of Medical Imaging

The Understanding of Light

Sir Isaac Newton  – 1671 – Particle Model of Light

Christiaan Huygens – 1678 – Huygens also provided much of the groundwork for the law of conservation of energy, the wave theory of light and the mathematics of probability.

Thomas Young – (1801) – of his many achievements the most important was to establish the wave theory of light. Proved that light propagates as a wave. Demonstrated interference patterns. Double-slit experiment

Augustin Fresnel – 1815 – first proposed that light is a wave

James Clerk MaxwellElectromagnetic Theory

Max Planck – Electromagnetic radiation is emitted as quanta

Heinrich Hertz – First to prove the existence of electromagnetic waves

Albert Einstein photon model of light

The Understanding of X-rays:

Wilhem Roentgen – 1895 The discovery of X-rays

Julius Plucker –  was a pioneer in the investigations of cathode rays that led eventually to the discovery of the electron.

Henri Becquerell, 1896 – a French scientist working along the same lines as Roentgen, discovered a natural radiation source

George Eastman – 1888 – introduction of film

G. Holst – The idea of an image intensifier tube was first proposed by G. Holst and H. De Boer in 1928, in the Netherlands . These tubes convert low levels of light from various wavelengths into visible quantities of light at a single wavelength.

Sir William Morgan  – apparently the first experimenter with x-rays, 110 years before they were brought in 1895 into prominence by Roentgen.

Michael Faraday (1821) – discovered that a magnetic field influenced polarized light 

Wilhelm Hittorf (1870) – discovered florescent discharge, termed ‘cathode rays’.

Philipp Lenard proposed ‘inverse square law’. 1905 – Nobel Prize

Dr. Albert Salman – 1912 –  x-rayed mastectomy samples and found differences between cancerous and normal tissue

William David Coolidge – 1913 – invented what would later be known as Coolidge tubes, which create X-rays through the use of a vacuum tube. 

Dr. Otto Wakhoff – German physicist who took early dental xrays

The Discovery of Electrons:

J.J. Thompson 1897 – showed that the cathode ray consisted of negatively charged particles (electrons)

Charles Barkla – 1902 – he commenced his investigations on Röentgen radiation which were to occupy almost his whole life.

The Discovery of Positrons

Ernest Lawrence – 1932 – Invention of the cyclotron

Carl D. Anderson 1930 – with Professor Millikan, he began his cosmic-ray studies which led in 1932 to the discovery of the positron.

Gordon L. Brownell – invented the technology that evolved into positron emission tomography, commonly known as a PET scan, which uses radioactive tracers to pinpoint the location of diseased tissue.

Dr. Egas Moniz 1949 – awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for prefrontal leucotomy, but should rather be remembered for his key contribution to modern brain imaging.

 David E. Kuhal – recorded the first true axial tomographic
images
of emission sources.

James Robertson – 1961 – builds the first single-plane positron emission tomography (PET) scan at the Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Ronald Jack Jaszczak – coined the term single photon emission computed tomography – SPECT

Roy Edwards – SPECT has its origin in the work of David Kuhal and Roy Edwards, with their Mark I scanner

Tatsuo Ido  – the development of F-18 FDG isotope

John Mallard – He is known for his and his colleagues’ work in the development of radionuclide imagingmagnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and, in particular, positron emission tomography (PET). 

Randy Brill  – 1977 – The Information Processing in Medical Imaging conference – IPMI –

The Harnassing of Gamma Rays:

Benedict Cassen – 1950 – assembled the first automated scanning system that was comprised of a motor driven scintillation detector coupled to a relay printer. 

Hal Anger – invention of the first radioisotope ‘scintillation’ camera

 Georg von Hevesy –  He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1943 for his development of isotope tracing.

Andrew Castagnini – 1980’s – Electron beam CT (Fifth-generation CT) Electron beam tomography (EBCT) was introduced in the early 1980s, by medical physicist Andrew Castagnini , as a method of improving the temporal resolution of CT scanners. 

Charles David

David E. Kuhl – early 1960s, he developed cross-sectional computed tomographic (CT) imaging techniques for nuclear medicine emission tomography that predated x-ray CT scanning and was the forerunner of single-photon emission CT (known as SPECT) and PET scanning. 

Douglas Boyd, Ph.D – conceived the first fan-beam, rotary Computed Tomography scanners using Xenon detector arrays which became the standard in the industry for 20 years.

The Development of [Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS)

Dr. Paul Capp – 1970s – The term “digital radiology” was first introduced

Dr. Andre Duerinckx MD PhD – Lead the development of Ultrasound Mini-PACS

Professor Heinz Lemke – 1979 – In that paper, he describes a modern PACS, with components including an interface to a hospital information system.

Dr. Stephen Horii – Is widely regarded as one of the leaders in the development of the DICOMM standard, and has a special interest in workstations

Dr. Sol Nudelman

The Harnassing of Sound Waves

Lazzaro Spallanzani –  1794 – performed studies on bats that concluded that they could navigate using sound rather than sight.

Christian Doppler was an Austrian mathematician and physicist, who gave the principle of ‘Doppler Effect’, which states that observed frequency of a wave depends on the relative speed of the source and the observer. “

Paul Hugenholtz – introduced the first practical 2D scanner, termed multidimensional echocardiography.

Dennis Watkins – 1966 – designed pulse doppler technology

Joseph Holmes – 1962 – together with engineers William Wright and Ralph Meyerdirk develop a new compound contact scanner using wire mechanisms and electronic position transducing potentiometers.

Douglas Howry – developed pulse-echo ultrasonic scanner

William J. Fry – Pioneer in the field of therapeutic ultrasound who first used computers in diagnostic ultrasonography and neurosonic medical imaging to detect disease.

Dr. Karl Dussik1947 – Dussik develops an apparatus to make images of the brain and ventricles using heat sensitive paper to record the echoes of the ultrasonic transmissions. The images are called ‘ventriculograms‘.

John Wild and John Reid created a handheld B-mode device which was used to help detect breast tumors.

Dr. Ian MacDonald – 1956 – The first time ultrasound was used for clinical reasons 

Jean-Daniel Colladon – received an Académie des Sciences award with his friend Charles Sturm for their measurement of the speed of sound and the breaking up of water jets.

The Development of Magnetic Resonance Imaging:

Sir Joseph Larmor (1857-1942) 

Sir Peter Mansfield – 1977 – an English physicist who was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, shared with Paul Lauterbur, for discoveries concerning Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI).

n 1973, Paul Lauterbur (State University of New York) described a new imaging technique that he termed Zeugmatography

In 1975, Richard Ernst introduced 2D NMR using phase and frequency encoding.

Dr. Raymond Damadian – ” Dr. Damadian was the first to describe the concept of whole-body NMR scanning, as well as discovering the tissue relaxation differences that made this feasible. In 1969, he first proposed the idea of using nuclear magnetic resonance technology to scan the human body externally for early signs of malignancy. In 1974, he received the first patent in the field of MRI.  

July 3, 1977 – The first MRI body scan is performed on a
human using an MRI machine developed by American doctors
Raymond Damadian, Larry Minkoff and Michael Goldsmith.

Dr. Robert Ledley – He called his invention the automatic computerized transverse axial scanner (ACTA). It was, in effect, the first machine capable of producing cross-sectional images of any part of the body.

Dr. Shinji Takahashi – the first to advocate the basic concepts of CT in the 1950’s,

Dr. Sven Ivar Seldinger – 1953 – The Seldinger method of guide-wire catheterization

Robert Hofstadter –  In 1948 he discovered that sodium iodide, activated by thallium, made an excellent scintillation counter

Kurt Wuthrich Nobel Chemistry laureate, known for developing nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) methods for studying biological macromolecules.[2][

n 1946, a Harvard particle physicist, Robert R. Wilson, proposed using proton beams for medical application.

Luke Chapman – Michel Ter-Pogossian, Michael E. Phelps, Edward J. Hoffman built the first PET camera for human studies.

Michael Phelps – the inventor of positron emission tomography (PET) and the first PET scanner

Nikola Tesla 1882 – Discovered the rotating magnetic field

Paul Dirac –  made fundamental contributions to the early development of both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics

Paul Harper – and colleagues at the
University of Chicago were the first investigators to explore the use an Anger camera for transaxial tomography

Paul Lauterber –  an American chemist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2003 with Peter Mansfield for his work which made the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) possible.[1]

Professor Isador I.Rabi – Nobel Prize in 1944 for the discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance

R.N. Bracewell – 1956 – Probably the first application of Radon’s .reconstruction mathematics.

Reynaldo Cid dos Santos – performed the first aortography in Lisbon in 1929. In 1930, 

Will Kalender – Siemens’ R&D director, developer of first spiral CT

Roy Edwards – The concept of emission and transmission tomography

Stefan Kaczmarz – 1937- discovered an iterative algorithm for solving a system of linear equations [Kac37], known as Kaczmarz’s algorithm or Kaczmarz’s method

The Invention of Tomography:

Karol Mayer – 1914 – used principal of movement to sharpen details closest to the detector, and blur structures further away

Andre Brocade – 1921 – patented concepts of tomography that led him to be known as the “father of tomography”.

Sir Godfrey HounsfieldHounsfield units (HU) are a dimensionless unit universally used in computed tomography (CT) scanning to express CT numbers in a standardized and convenient form.

Dr. Allan M. Cormack – shared Nobel Prize, in 1979, with Godfrey Hounsfield….for invention of Computerized Tomography scanner

Ziedses des Plantes: 1934 – Laminography

Two other Frenchman, Felix Portes and Maurice Chausse also patented tomography in 1921

Ernest Pohl – A German engineer, patented a tomography apparatus in 1927

Willem Bartelink – The French Canadian patented tomography in 1931

Gustav Grossmann – patented in 1934. Grossmann built the first commercial equipment via his company Siemens-Reiniger-Veifa GmbH.

Dr. Alessandro Vallebona –  proposed a method to represent a single slice of the body on the radiographic film, know as Tomography.

William Oldendorf – In 1960, William Oldendorf patented an electronically based device that could capture image slices continuously through a solid object. What Oldendorf’s device lacked was the computational power to turn those image slices into a single 3-D image.

William Watson – 1937 – patented axial transverse tomography and obtained the first radiographic images using this technique (London, UK)

Lars Leksell – renowned as the inventor of radiosurgery and developer of the advanced radiosurgical platform that bears his name, Leksell Gamma Knife.

Dr. Mihran Kassabian – His contributions to radiology included the introduction of a positioning device that accurately displayed the round nature of the ribs on an X-ray image.

James Fujimoto – He is known for his leading role in the invention of a novel medical imaging modality named optical coherence tomography[1] that is now a standard of care for diagnosis and treatment of several diseases with widespread adoption in ophthalmology.[2]

The Development of Positron Emission Tomography

Louis Sokoloff – an American neuroscientist. He is considered to be a pioneer in functional imaging of the brain.

William Sweet and physicist Gordon Brownell – Brownell played a key role in developing positron imaging and positron emission tomography.

Johann K.A. Radon – an Austrian mathematician who pioneered approaches to the reconstruction of images from projections.

Jean Kieffer – American Inventor of Body-section radiography

Charles T. Dotter – 1960s – introduced image-guided intervention

Julio Palmaz, an Argentine physician, develops the balloon-expandable stent and transforms interventional radiology.

Ronald Nutt and David Townsend – 1998 – invent the PET-CT scan which combines positron emission tomography and computerized tomography