Forty years ago today (July 19, 1983), Michael Vannier, J. Marsh and J. Warren published the first three-dimensional reconstruction of single computed tomography (CT) slices of the human head.
Their Radiology article stated that “Advanced computer-aided aircraft design techniques were adapted and applied to craniofacial surgical procedure-planning and evaluation using surface contours obtained from CT scans.”
The 1979 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded jointly to South African-American physicist Allan MacLeod Cormack and British electrical engineer Godfrey Hounsfield "for the development of computer-assisted tomography."
According to the Nobel press release, “When the method was introduced into medical care six years ago it quickly became apparent that it signified something revolutionarily new, with great repercussions with X-ray diagnostics and the medical disciplines that make use of it.”