Seeing inside without opening — radiography, CT, MRI and ultrasound, and the reading that turns signal into diagnosis.
10 topics · 10 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Computed Tomography — An Increasing Source of Radiation Exposure
David J. Brenner & Eric J. Hall · 2007
Argues that the rapid growth in CT scanning, each scan delivering far more radiation than a plain film, is raising population cancer risk enough to…
+2 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
On a New Kind of Rays
W. C. Röntgen · 1895
Reports a radiation produced by a discharge tube, invisible to the eye, that passes through wood and flesh but not lead or bone, and works through…
+2 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Transluminal Treatment of Arteriosclerotic Obstruction: Description of a New Technic and a Preliminary Report of Its Application
Charles T. Dotter & Melvin P. Judkins · 1964
Demonstrates that a narrowed artery can be reopened by passing catheters of increasing size through the blockage from inside the vessel, founding the…
+3 more at this level
10 works
David J. Brenner & Eric J. Hall
Argues that the rapid growth in CT scanning, each scan delivering far more radiation than a plain film, is raising population cancer risk enough to justify stricter indications and lower-dose protocols.
link checked 17 Sept 2026World Health Organization
Teaches the basic scanning protocols and image interpretation a general practitioner in a resource-limited setting needs to use ultrasound safely without specialist radiology training.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Trafton Drew, Melissa L.-H. Võ & Jeremy M. Wolfe
Finds that most expert radiologists searching CT scans for lung nodules fail to notice a gorilla image inserted into the scan, showing that focused visual search for one target can blind an expert to an obvious but unexpected one.
link checked 17 Sept 2026W. C. Röntgen
Reports a radiation produced by a discharge tube, invisible to the eye, that passes through wood and flesh but not lead or bone, and works through the experiments ruling out every known form of light.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Saul Hertz & Arthur Roberts
Reports using a radioactive tracer taken up selectively by the thyroid gland to measure its function and, in higher doses, treat it directly, founding both diagnostic and therapeutic nuclear medicine on the same isotope.
Pranav Rajpurkar et al.
Presents a convolutional neural network trained on over 100,000 chest X-rays that matches or exceeds practising radiologists at detecting pneumonia, an early and widely cited proof point for claims that deep learning can reach expert-level performance on a specific radiological reading task.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Charles T. Dotter & Melvin P. Judkins
Demonstrates that a narrowed artery can be reopened by passing catheters of increasing size through the blockage from inside the vessel, founding the technique that became angioplasty.
Godfrey N. Hounsfield
Describes a system that reconstructs a cross-sectional image of tissue density from thousands of x-ray absorption readings taken at different angles, the technique that became computed tomography.
Paul C. Lauterbur
Shows that adding a magnetic field gradient to an NMR signal lets the resulting frequency encode spatial position, turning nuclear magnetic resonance from a chemistry tool into an imaging technique.
Scott Mayer McKinney et al.
Reports a deep learning system that outperformed radiologists at detecting cancer in mammograms across independent US and UK datasets, while noting the large gap between that result and what is needed to deploy such a system safely in practice.