Mathematical basis of computed tomography (Cormack)
Reconstrucción matemática de imágenes tomográficas (Cormack)
- Date
- 1956-1963 · confidence high
- Place
- Groote Schuur Hospital, Cape Town, South Africa
- Credited to
- Allan MacLeod Cormack
- People
- 👤 Allan McLeod Cormack1924–1998
- Field
- Life & health
What was discovered
As the hospital's physicist, Cormack asked himself how to calculate X-ray absorption at each point in the body from multiple projections, and developed the theory and a first experiment. It is the mathematical basis of computed tomography.
He posed the problem in 1956 in Cape Town and published in 1963-1964 from Tufts University. The Radon transform (1917) had solved the same problem, unknown to him.
What it led to
- Hounsfield's CT scanner (1971)
- tomographic reconstruction in PET and MRI
- the 1979 Nobel Prize in Medicine, shared with Hounsfield