10/01/2025
The scan was conducted by a team led by Sir Godfrey Hounsfield, an English engineer working for EMI Laboratories. Hounsfield was the inventor of the CT scanner, and his ideas were essential for the project’s development.
He collaborated closely with Dr. James Ambrose, a neuroradiologist at the hospital, during the initial clinical application.
The first patient was a woman with a suspected brain tumor. At the time, traditional X-rays and other diagnostic tools could not provide sufficient detail of soft tissues within the skull.
Hounsfield’s new invention offered the revolutionary possibility to visualize internal “slices” of the brain with much greater clarity.
The procedure involved the patient’s head being placed in the scanner, which rotated gradually to collect X-ray data from multiple angles.
Data acquisition for the scan took about 5 minutes, but computer processing and image reconstruction lasted more than 2 hours due to slow hardware of that time.
The resulting images allowed doctors to precisely locate and understand the nature of the brain tumor, confirming the power of CT imaging.
