Godfrey hounsfield autobiography of benjamin

Radiology is known as the science of using medical imaging to help diagnose and, in some cases, treat diseases in the human body. Many different imaging techniques are a part of radiology including x-ray, computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), ultrasound and more.

The history of radiology started with Wilhelm Roentgen in 1895. Wilhelm was able to take the first x-ray, which was of his wife and won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1901 due to his new discovery. He had experimented with passing electric currents through a tube and by doing so, was able to figure out how to turn this experiment into an X-ray.

The ability to take an x-ray was a huge advancement in the medical community. It allowed for the diagnosis of fractures, broken bones, ailments and much more. It wasn’t long after Wilhelm’s discovery that machines were produced and x-ray technology became a commonly used diagnostic procedure throughout the medical community.

The First Radiographs

Originally, radiographs were made onto glass photographic plates. When George Eastman introduced film in 1918, things changed a bit. However, today, many of the radiographic images are recorded and stored digitally.

More Radiology Technology Added

Over the years, many new techniques falling into the radiology category have been introduced. CT scanning was one of them, which was invented by Godfrey Hounsfield and announced in 1972. In addition, ultrasound started to be used in the 1950s with “real-time” ultrasound machines coming to the medical community in the late 1970s.

Other Important Discoveries and Events throughout the History of Radiology

Since 1895, plenty has changed. Just one year after Wilhelm Roentgen took the first x-ray, Antoine Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity. In the same year, Sydney Rowland founded the first radiology journal called the Archives of Clinical Skiagraphy. The year 1896, was a huge year as Thomas Edison also invented the firs

Last month saw the demise of yet another of Britain’s former industrial giants. Sony Corporation and Universal Music Group bought the only remaining shiny jewels off the corpse of what was once the mighty EMI Group, for almost 80 years a world leader the fields of music recording and publishing as well as electronic research, development and manufacturing. At its height in the 1960s, EMI employed 14,000 people at its 150 acre Blyth Road headquarters in Hayes, Middlesex.

It is sadly ironic that this year marks the centenary of the Blyth Road plant and the 80th anniversary of the founding of EMI itself, in March 1931.

But re-wind to 1897 when gramophone inventor, the German Emile Berliner, founded the Gramophone Company in London. Among the firm’s early artists were Nellie Melba and Enrico Caruso. In 1899 the Gramophone Company adopted the iconic picture of His Master’s Voice by British painter Francis Barraud as a trademark logo. But first they asked him to change the image of the gramophone from a cylinder format to their own disk format. Adverse business conditions during the Depression caused the Gramophone Company to merge with its rival Colombia Phonograph Company in 1931, forming Electric and Musical Industries (EMI).

By this time the company had been operating out of its Hayes HQ for some 20 years. The next several decades saw it become a huge operation as it scooped up – and made deals with – existing successful labels. EMI acquired Parlophone and Capitol, and established licensing agreements with RCA Victor, Columbia and Tamla Motown giving it an astonishing roster which included: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Cliff Richard, Elvis Presley, Adam Faith, The Beach Boys, the leading Tamla Motown artists and – most famously of all – the Beatles. By the time it signed Robbie Williams and the Spice Girls in the 1990s, EMI had also acquired Virgin Music and in the 1970s taken on Pink Floyd,

Benjamin "Benny" Felson (1913-1988) was a renowned Cincinnati chest radiologist who coined or popularized several of the most commonly-used terms in the everyday parlance of the English-speaking radiology community.  

Benjamin Felson was born in Newport, Kentucky on 21 October 1913 but soon after his family moved to Cincinnati where he attended school and the University of Cincinnati, earning his MD in 1935. He then went on to work at the Cincinnati General Hospital first as an intern and then as a radiology resident (at the time a three-year course), followed by a one-year fellowship in cancer therapy at the Indianapolis City Hospital . Two of his brothers were also physicians, Henry Felson (1907-1998), was an internal medicine specialist in Cincinnati and Walter Felson (1908-1980), a family practitioner in Ohio.

He married Virginia Raphaelson in 1937 and had five children, Steve, Nancy, Marcus, Richie and Eddie .

He joined the army in 1942 and from 1943-1945 he was Chief of Radiology of the 28th General Hospital in Europe. He reached the rank of major .

Terms and signs coined and popularized

Returning home, after World War II, he started at the Cincinnati General Hospital in 1945 as an assistant professor, becoming Professor and Director of the radiology department in 1951, a position he held until 1973, after which time, he remained a professor of radiology. He became Professor Emeritus in 1983, until his death from a myocardial infarction on 22 October 1988 . 

He was always renowned for his excellent teaching and his superlative interpretive skills at the lightbox.

He was the author of five books, over 150 papers and founded the journal Seminars in Roentgenology. His lectures and writings were notable for their humor and his literary pursuits resulted in the publication of a collection of essays on Humor in Medicine.

"He was certainly the greatest radiologist of his time, and perhaps of all time. He was one of th

See the article by Yao et al. in this issue, pp. 1184–1196.

Imaging of the brain began with coarse and indirect means like evaluating for brain shifts with catheter angiography and for ventricular size and position with pneumoencephalography. Sir Godfrey Hounsfield and head CT then revolutionized brain imaging in the early 1970s. Immediately on the heels of CT came the brilliance of brain MRI, developed through the Nobel-prize winning work of Damadian, Lauterbur, and Mansfield. The ability to discriminate between types of tissues, through various image contrast-producing “weightings,” represented the quantum leap of MRI beyond CT. Depiction of anatomy became exquisite. Differentiation between gray and white matter was easy. Brain tumors were much more easily identified and characterized. Intravenous gadolinium contrast added even more discrimination.

This anatomical or structural imaging has become exquisite over the last 50 years. But we wanted more, to “see” physiology, and so physiologic/mechanistic/functional MRI techniques were developed. Restricted diffusion on diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) implies the energetic failure of cell membrane ion pumps in ischemic infarction but also increased cellularity in tumors. Perfusion imaging in its various iterations (dynamic susceptibility contrast [DSC], arterial spin labeling, dynamic contrast enhanced [DCE]) gives us metrics like cerebral blood volume, cerebral blood flow, and K_trans, important for evaluating tumor neovascularity. MR spectroscopy measures metabolites which are altered in disease states. The image contrast with all of these techniques is based on MR signal differences between tissues, which are derived from the differing electromagnetic characteristics of precessing protons existing within differing chemical environments. This tissue contrast is coaxed into visualization through the complexity and genius of MRI radiofrequency pulse sequences.

The power of physiologic imaging has been made