European Stars and Stripes (Newspaper) - December 28, 1993, Darmstadt, Hesse                                Focus a patient awaits positron emission tomography examination at new York University medical Center the pet a costly brain mapping technique developed in the t970s, is used primarily in research. Probing the transparent human Bod High tech imaging is revolutionizing Medicine by John Barbour the associated press thanks to the wizardry of the computer and some old scientific playthings doctors can now prowl around inside the human body take inventory of the organs even the brain and the beating heart see it All on television screens a without shedding Alsop of blood. Science has not quite made the body transparent but it s getting there. Fiber optics in the form of probes Are investigating and in some cases treating the body s innards from Stem to Stern. Magnetic resonance imaging and computerized tomography cat scans Are providing incredibly graphic pictures of virtually All the body s organs. And there Are even newer devices that will Tell experts what parts of the brain Are working How they can shift that Burden to other parts and what is amiss in the brains of schizophrenics and stroke victims. Without shedding a drop of blood. By marrying ultrasound and computers doctors can conjure up a three dimensional picture of a living beating heart from a variety of angles. Without shedding a drop of blood. It s approaching the Sci i dexterity of Star trek flight surgeons who get a whole body Reading from a hand held sensor. In the right hands today s diagnosis is much easier less invasive than it used to be. Quot some of the things we used to do were not Only torturous and risky but stupid Quot recalls or. Norman Chase chairman of the department of radiology at new York University medical Center. Now doctors can see a Large part of the Large Bowel by inserting a fiber optic probe and should they encounter a polyp they excise it right then and there. Almost the entire upper gastrointestinal tract and the Bronchi Are visible with Kindred  old fashioned devices they replaced were Large Metal Scopes that could not Bend were not Maneu Merable and caused the patient great discomfort. Technological and scientific advances have a kind of Geometric progression Chase says. Quot everything builds on what was before it Quot he says. Quot what we have in Medicine is really the application Many years later of technology that s already known. But you can t spend that kind of Money on hardware in Medicine that you do in the defense  an Fri machine can run from $1 million to $2 million. But on the other hand Chase says every Hospital in new York City could be equipped with mris for the Cost of one fighter plane. So while the technology was Long at work in other Fields its emergence in Medicine is Only two decades old. Quite often it is not Only Money but the nation s priorities that retard or encourage new techniques. It is the computer Industry that drives some of the new diagnostic devices. Chase says they had High Resolution monitors in the defense department Quot years and years ago Quot but they Cost up to $200,000 apiece. Quot you could t afford those in the medical Industry Quot he says. Quot when they Cost $2,000 to $3,000 each you could afford them. The same is True of the chips that allow screen resolutions of 2,000 to 4,000 lines. Those Are enormously expensive and As they get cheaper and cheaper when they Cost a few Hundred dollars then they get into the medical . Many of the devices notably the Fri and the cat scan were developed in the Early 1970s. Godfrey Hounsfield was working for the giant Emi a British version of Ria. Emi was credited with Early radar and commercial television. It also had a record company that featured the beatles and a Chain of movie Heaters Godfrey Hounsfield who did t even have a graduate degree was a very Small part of Emi. Quot Godfrey had never come up with anything important prior to the scanner Quot Chase says. But he had an idea that you could Send Pencil thin a rays into the human body and record the absorption with scintillation detectors and photo multiplier tubes accumulate and do computations to reconstruct Cross sectional pictures of the brain and body. Hounsfield s contraption essentially counted the photons that pass through a Pencil thin Section of the brain shifting the position and the Angle until a semicircle around the brain was described. This enabled the computation of thousands of different Points that could e translated into a picture in varying shades of  was called a cat scan a for computerized Axial tomography and Hounsfield won a Nobel prize in Medicine the Basic Roadblock to further development w As the imitation of available computers. The first images took 24 a computer equivalent in Power to a modern pc Cost the stars and stripes tuesday december 28, 1993