Seeing things more clearly.

Abstract

Our Mackenzie Davidson Lecturer, Alex Margulis, recently described the last decade as “the golden era for developments in diagnostic imaging” (Margulis, 1985). In discussing some of the remarkable developments that have either originated or made their early progress in this country, I would argue that it was in the 1950s that the explosive development of medical imaging really began (Fig. 1). In the Opening Address of the Annual Congress of the British Institute of Radiology in December 1953, V. W. Mayneord made “a case for physical resources to be applied increasingly to the investigation of the patient” (Mayneord, 1954); he pointed out the usefulness of the cathode-ray tube (CRT) for displaying radionuclide distributions and showed how radiography could be carried out with enormous reductions in dose by scanning the patient with a pencil beam of radiation. These concepts, and extensions of them, will be found to recur throughout my talk. In 1953, ultrasonic B-scanning had just been demonstrated. The pro...