X-Radiation Project

Abstract

This project will look at the history of X-radiation in its notable historical forms and trace the use of the technology all the way to contemporary forms of X-Radiation, including computed tomography. The origins of the two technologies will be traced as well as the improvements that have been made to them over the past number of decades. The importance of the technology will be assessed in terms of its efficiency and usefulness in the context of modern medicine. The finding is that CT, CAT, and X-ray allow for great convenience, lower cost, and higher quality imaging than is possible without these technologies.

Background & State of the Art

The story of X-rays begins in the late Nineteenth Century when a German professor named Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen introduced the discovery that a cathode ray tube could create a fluorescent glow of crystals that were placed on a surface near the tube (NA, 2014). After giving the cathode ray tube a higher voltage and removing all air from the inside of the tube, the professor found that the tube gave nearby objects a fluorescent glow of light. The upshot for the professor from this improvised experiment was that the tube must be giving off a new kind of ray that scientists were not yet familiar with.

The most significant part of Roentgen’s discovery, for modern medical purposes, at least, was that the new ray given off by the cathode ray tube could go through human skin but not through harder materials like human bones (NA, 2014). The fact that the cathode tube was a common object in university and scientific circles meant that the rays could be readily reproduced all around the world, which added to the excitement and momentousness of the discovery at the time.

Later on Marie Curie took up the discoveries of Henri Becquerel in order to take X-ray technology to its next iteration. Henri Becquerel is credited with discovering natural radioactivity in the year 1896, and Marie Curie went back to Becquerel’s work in order to utilize radium and uranium as a source for gamma rays (NA, 2014). This new technology helped radiography grow very quickly on account of its widespread use during the Second World War. Marie Curie discovered polonium, and radium helped launch X-ray as a full scale industrial production during the interwar period.

In addition to these initial forms of X-ray, new forms have sprung up to become very useful. One of these forms that is in wide use in medicine today is computed tomography, popularly known as ‘CT scan.’ This form of radiation differs from the older forms as it produces a different kind of image. To be specific, CT does not exactly function in the old way, in which x-rays leaving the subject are registered by a device (FDA, 2015). Instead, CT gives a cross section image of the desired area of the body or object. As noted on the FDA’s website, tomography indicates that the image is a cross section, since it is the Greek word that means ‘to slice.’

Technologically speaking, CT uses some novel techniques and hardware to get its unique kind of image. New CT systems can perform a ‘spiral’ image, and can also produce an image of many different cross sections at a time, presenting them simultaneously after only a single scan (FDA, 2015). The advantage of this new technology in CT scans is that it allows for wider regions and more varied regions of the body to be captured in a single scan. This allows for lower costs and more efficient treatment, especially for medical patients with multiple ailments or whose conditions or ailments are difficult to pin down to a single region of the body. Some also refer to CT as a CAT scan.

The history of CT or CAT goes back to 1972 when Godfrey Hounsfield, an engineer, invented the technology along with his colleague from South Africa, Allan Cormack (Imaginis, 2015). The two researchers eventually won the Nobel Peace Prize due to their life long work in science and medicine. The technology has come on by leaps and bounds since its introductionin the 1970s. The first CT scans were slow and took a very long time to come up with their data. In fact, while newer scanners can quickly produce multiple ‘slices’ of imagery in different bodily regions, the first machines took ages to produce a single ‘slice’ of data.

This slower technology took days to produce a ‘slice’ of data, and this made the process very inefficient by today’s standards. In fact, the new scanners can almost instantly produce 4 slices of imagery data at the same time (Imaginis, 2015). At first, the technology was dedicated to imaging the head, but quickly this expanded to include images of the whole of the human body. Despite the march of technology, the imaging devices remain so expensive that only about 6,000 CT scanners are active in the United States, with a mere 30,000 CT scanners active on a worldwide scale.

The original technology had the additional disadvantage of being low resolution. This meant that the images produced could cover only a small fraction or slice of the body. These days, the images produced are much higher resolution, allowing for more of the body to be scanned and each region scanned able to be imaged in much greater detail. This gives doctors and radiographers more flexibility and more ability to make diagnoses and detect abnormalities in the subject.

References

FDA. (2015). What is Computed Tomography?
Imaginis. (2015). Brief history of ct. The Women's Health Resource.
NA. (2014). HIstory of Radiography. NDT Resource Center.