Skip to Main Content
Biomedical Imaging: Principles and Applications
book

Biomedical Imaging: Principles and Applications

by Reiner Salzer
May 2012
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
448 pages
14h 39m
English
Wiley
Content preview from Biomedical Imaging: Principles and Applications

Chapter 4

Computed Tomography

Stefan Ulzheimer and Thomas Flohr

Computed Tomography Department, Siemens Healthcare, Forchheim, Germany

4.1 Basics

4.1.1 History

The first commercial medical X-ray Computed Tomography (CT) scanner was built in 1972 by the English engineer G.N. Hounsfield for the company EMI Ltd. as a pure head scanner with a conventional X-ray tube and a dual-row detector system moving incrementally around the patient.

It was able to acquire 12 slices, each 13 mm thick, and reconstruct the images with a matrix of 80 × 80 pixels in approximately 35 min. Figure 4.1 shows the image of the head on one of these early scanners and how it compares to the image quality of a state-of-the-art CT scanner today. Today, the whole brain can be visualized with high quality from a 10-s scan.

Figure 4.1 Development of computed tomography over time. (a) Cross-sectional image of a brain in the year 1971 and (b) the whole brain with sagital, coronal, and cross-sectional slices in the year 2007. Courtesy of Mayo Clinic, Rochester.

4.1

Until 1989 there were no principally new developments in conventional CT, although of course the performance of the CT scanners increased dramatically with the engineering progress. By then, the acquisition time for one image decreased from 300 s in 1972 to 1–2 s, slices as thin as 1 mm became possible, and the in-plane resolution increased from 3 line pairs ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Biomedical Imaging

Biomedical Imaging

Tim Salditt, Timo Aspelmeier, Sebastian Aeffner
Biomedical Imaging

Biomedical Imaging

Peter Morris
Ultrasound Elastography for Biomedical Applications and Medicine

Ultrasound Elastography for Biomedical Applications and Medicine

Ivan Z. Nenadic, Matthew W. Urban, James F. Greenleaf, Jean-Luc Gennisson, Miguel Bernal, Mickael Tanter
Compression of Biomedical Images and Signals

Compression of Biomedical Images and Signals

Amine Naït-Ali, Christine Cavaro-Menard

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781118271926Purchase book