Sir Godfrey Hounsfield, Inventor of Computed Tomography
August 12, 2016
This week we’re recognizing British electrical engineer, and x-ray computed tomography (CT scan) inventor Sir Godfrey Hounsfield. Hounsfield helped design the first commercially available all-transistor computer made in Great Britain: the EMIDEC 1100 in 1958. Hounsfield invented what is now known as a CT scan machine (x-ray computed tomography) and successfully scanned a live patient in 1971. For his part in developing the ground-breaking technology, he and partner Allan Cormack won a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1979. Sir Godfrey Hounsfield’s name is also immortalized by the Hounsfield scale, which is a measure of radiodensity used in evaluating CT scans. He was knighted as Sir in 1981.