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First published June 23, 2006 as JAMIA PrePrint; doi:10.1197/jamia.M2127
Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 2006;13(5):465-469
© 2006 American Medical Informatics Association

A more recent version of this article appeared on September 1, 2006
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Submitted on April 12, 2006
Accepted on June 6, 2006

The Story Behind the Development of the First Whole-body Computerized Tomography Scanner as Told by Robert S. Ledley

Dean F. Sittig PhD1* and Joan S. Ash PhD2

Affiliation of the authors: 1 Department of Medical Informatics, Kaiser Permanente, Northwest, Portland, OR; Department of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, OR ; 2 Department of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, OR

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.

Dr. Robert S. Ledley is credited with sowing the seeds for the field of medical informatics [Ledley, 1959], initiating the development of computerized medical image analysis [Ledley, 1974], and for being the principal investigator of the Protein Information Resource (PIR) for 20 years [Dayhoff, 1965]. Dr. Ledley is best known for developing the first whole-body computerized tomography (CT or CAT) scanner in 1973 (Patent No. 3,922,552), which revolutionized diagnostic medicine. Dr. Ledley's first CT scanner [which he called the Automatic Computerized Transverse Axial, or ACTA, scanner; [Ledley, 1974a & 1974b] is now owned by the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of American History [Kondratas, 2005]. Using his scanner, he was the first to perform three-dimensional reconstructions [Huang, 1975], the first to use CT in radiation therapy planning for cancer patients [Scheer, 1977], and the creator of many other firsts in the application of CT in medicine. The following story describes his efforts to develop this scanner.






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