Godfrey Hounsfield

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Sir Godfrey Newbold Hounsfield CBE (born August 28, 1919 in Newark , Nottinghamshire , † August 12, 2004 in Kingston upon Thames ) was a British electrical engineer and Nobel Prize winner for medicine . He is considered to be one of the fathers of computer tomography .

biography

Growing up in a small town in Nottinghamshire as the youngest of five children of a steel worker, he became interested in the technical equipment that was in use on his father's farm from an early age . His thirst for knowledge was expressed in many daring attempts. He built sound recorders, detonated barrels and attempted flights from a haystack. Attending Magnus Grammar School in Newark sparked his interest in mathematics and physics . With the outbreak of World War II, he volunteered as a reservist with the Royal Air Force in 1939 and got a job as a "Radar Mechanic Instructor", where he was involved in the development of large-screen oscilloscopes . He then received radio engineering training at the Royal College of Science in South Kensington and at the Cranwell Radar School . Following the war, he graduated from Faraday House Electrical Engineering College in London on a scholarship with a diploma. In 1951 he got a job at Electric and Musical Industries (EMI) in Hayes , Middlesex and worked on radars and guided missiles.

From 1958 he headed a development group that developed the first computer, the EMIDEC 1100, made entirely of transistors in England. When EMI was swimming in money due to the enormous success of the Beatles , he was free to choose his field of research.

The first prototype of a CT scanner

He was looking for new methods to depict the inside of the body. The idea was to use a computer to evaluate X-rays on many axes and thus to obtain layer images without overlapping. In 1968 he examined the brain of a pig. The machine scanned for nine days, and the computer calculated the 28,000 measurements for two hours, using algorithms described by Allan M. Cormack .

In further experiments he refined mechanics and algorithms. In 1971, the first person to be examined ("scanned") using a computer tomograph (CT) was a woman with a brain cyst. Between 1967 and 1976 he worked on the development of the first prototype of a computer tomograph.

With the scale named after him ( Hounsfield scale ) the attenuation of X-rays in tissue is described in computed tomography (CT) and represented in gray-scale images. The values ​​can be assigned to tissue types and pathological deviations can be recognized. For his scientific achievements he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in Stockholm in 1979 together with the South African physicist Allan M. Cormack (1924–1998). In 1981 he received the accolade "Order of the Britsh Empire" from the British Queen Elizabeth II .

The lifelong bachelor moved into his first permanent residence at the age of 60. On August 12, 2004, he died at the age of almost 85 in Kensington upon Thames.

Awards (selection)

The Hounsfield unit is named after him (see Hounsfield scale ), which is used to indicate the signal attenuation of a tissue in computed tomography.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Godfrey Hounsfield's autobiography, 1979, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1979/hounsfield/biographical/
  2. ↑ Godfrey N. Hounsfield: Computerized transverse axial scanning (tomography). In: British Journal of Radiology. Volume 46, 1973, pp. 1016-1022.
personal data
SURNAME Hounsfield, Godfrey
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hounsfield, Godfrey Newbold
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English electrical engineer
DATE OF BIRTH August 28, 1919
PLACE OF BIRTH Newark , Nottinghamshire
DATE OF DEATH August 12, 2004
Place of death Kingston upon Thames