Sir Godfrey Newbold Hounsfield CBE,
FRS, (August 28, 1919 – August 12, 2004) was an
English electrical engineer who shared the 1979
Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with
Allan McLeod Cormack for his part in developing the diagnostic technique of
X-ray computed tomography (CT).
His name is immortalised in the Hounsfield scale, a quantitative measure of radiodensity used in evaluating CT scans. The scale is defined in Hounsfield units (symbol HU), running from air at -1000 HU, through water at 0 HU, and up to bone at +1000 HU.
While on an outing in the country, Hounsfield came up with the idea that one could determine what was inside a box by taking X-ray readings at all angles around the object.
He then set to work constructing a computer that could take input from X-rays at various angles to create an image of the object in "slices". Applying this idea to the medical field led him to propose what is now known as computed tomography. At the time, Hounsfield was not aware of the work that Cormack had done on the theoretical mathematics for such a device.
