Is Rock and Roll to Thank for Modern CT Scans? Let’s Take a Closer Look!

About Electric and Music Industries (EMI)

EMI owned the Abbey Road Studies in the 1960s and 1970s. EMI signed The Beatles in 1963 and EMI profits rose 80% that first year. The incredible popularity of the Beatles during that time produced record profits for the company, which they were able to reinvest to fund various R&D projects.

How They got Involved in Science

In 1972 The Essential Beatles album was released. In that same year British engineer Godfrey Hounsfield working with physicist Dr. Allan Cormack, developed the first commercially available CT scanner from the funding at EMI Laboratories. Both were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1979 for this achievement. The Beatles record sales reached 200 million in 1963-68 generating great profits for their record company, EMI.

Beginning of CT

The idea of CT scanning was ingenious and elegant. The vision came to Hounsfield while he was on vacation. He was thinking about a way to reconstruct a 3D image of a box. Newbold Hounsfield was a high school drop out and tinkerer who helped build the first British all-transistor computer for the EMI in 1958. 

The inventors designed the CT by fixing an X-ray camera to a rotating disc that could pass around the patient’s body, focused at a detector that is also rotating around the patient. That accounts for the scanner’s signature “donut” shape that remains today.These values were then analyzed via a mathematical algorithm to produce a 2-dimensional image of the slice of the body. 

First CT Patient

The first imaging of a live patient happened in 1971 and the technology took off like a rocket. Hounsfield worked with a radiologist, James Ambrose, to conduct the first clinical CT-scan at Atkinson Morley Hospital in 1971 to view a brain tumor in a patient. Doctors Zeev Maizlin and Patrick Vos looked closely at the financial records and found that EMI had poured about £100,000 into the development of the CT scanner.

The information we can glean today from CT scans is invaluable. CT full body scans are preventive screenings, we can check plaque build up in the heart during heart CTA, and image the small hard to see details. In need of a CT scan? Work with our experienced and caring staff at BlueRock Imaging. Call to schedule today. (801) 529-3290

As a Small Tribute to The Beatles medical contribution we are offering a free “Here Comes the Sun” Printable! Enjoy!

Sources

The CT Scanner – The Beatles Greatest Gift to Mankind?

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/colby-cosh-the-little-known-role-the-beatles-played-in-revolutionizing-medical-imaging

https://www.ijuh.org/abstracts/rock-band-CT