'Computed Tomography of the Body: Initial Clinical Trial with the EMI Prototype' and 'Computed Tomography of the Body: Early Trends in Application and Accuracy of the Method'

摘要

Although they can be read as a hackneyed pun about radiology, these Beatles lyrics carry more substance pertaining to a reviewof the origins of CT. It is lost to history whether these words helped to inspire the executives of Electric and Musical Industries (EMI) to direct surplus earnings from Beatles record sales toward revolutionizing the way radiologists "look through you." Regardless, EMI's financial support of the research of Godfrey N. Hounsfield (who had been an EMI employee since 1951), made possible by the Beatles, did lead to the first prototype CT scanner in 1967 and the first clinical "EMI scanner" in 1971 ,Scarcely 3 years later, the revolutionary concept of CT had already evolved into EMI's first whole-body scanner, also designed by Hounsfield. By 1975, Patrick Sheedy and his colleagues at the Mayo Clinic and Robert Stanley (Editor Emeritus of this journal) and his colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis had begun to use this scanner, leading them to write the first comprehensive articles describing large series of primarily body CT examinations. These articles were printed in the July 1976 issue of this journal and were titled: "Computed Tomography of the Body: Initial Clinical Trial with the EMI Prototype" and "Computed Tomography of the Body: Early Trends in Application and Accuracy of the Method" . Both of these articles qualify among the 100 most-referenced articles in the AJR .