Natterer: The Mathematics of Imaging in Medicine and Technology

In 1917 the mathematician Radon published a paper on recovering a function in the plane from the values of its line integrals. In 1979 the engineer Hounsfield and the physicist Cormack received the Nobel price in medicine for the invention of computerized tomography (CT), a radiological imaging technique which provides cross sectional images of the human body. The mathematical principle behind CT is exactly the problem studied and solved by Radon.

In the talk we explain and visualize Radon's result and the imaging algorithms based on it. We also describe the mathematical background for novel imaging techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and emission tomography (PET and SPECT). Finally we show how these techniques are being applied to various problems in science and technology.

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Last modified: July 21, 1998