A part-time position as physicist for a hospital radiology department
first aroused Cormack's interest in the problem of X-ray imaging of
soft tissues or layers of tissue of differing densities. The two-dimensional
representations of conventional X-ray plates were often unable to distinguish
between such tissues. More information could be gained if X rays of
the body were taken from several different directions, but conventional
X-ray techniques made this procedure problematic. In the early 1960s
Cormack showed how details of a flat section of soft tissues could be
calculated from measurements of the attenuation of X rays passing through
it from many different angles. He thus provided the mathematical technique
for the CAT scan, in which an X-ray source and electronic detectors
are rotated about the body and the resulting data is analyzed by a computer
to produce a sharp map of the tissues within a cross section of the
body. Cormack became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
in 1980. |
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