Now, nearly a century after German physicist Konrad Roentgen burned the first X-ray image into a photographic plate, the technology available for detecting disease and deformity in the body and tissues has advanced far beyond vacuum tubes and chemical emulsions.
Computers are vital in tomography.
With their ability to make many calculations quickly, computers transform vast streams of raw data gathered by scanning machines into vivid images of tumors, infections, internal bleeding, and other life-threatening conditions. But if computers are the eyes of medical imaging, then mathematics is certainly its brain. The Nobel Committee recognized this by awarding half of the 1979 prize for physiology or medicine to U.S. physicist Allan Cormack. He worked out the mathematics of what we now call computer-assisted tomography, or CAT scanning. In CAT scanning, an X-ray scanner probes the patient from multiple angles, gathering information on the density of internal organs and tissues.