Telescope on the Stomach

An astronomer's telescope would seem oddly out of place in a doctor's office. But at the University of Chicago, Dr. Paul C. Hodges, has turned a Schmidt-type telescope into a highly efficient camera for making X-ray pictures of the human abdomen. The simplified system of lenses and concave mirror that can photograph the dimmest starlight is being used for quick, sharp snapshots of a faint, fluorescent screen.

Doctors can now look forward to routine abdominal X rays--perhaps as useful to preventive medicine as production-line chest X rays have been in the fight against TB. In the past, X-ray study of the intestines has been an expensive and time-consuming process. Where one chest X ray is usually enough, an examination of the stomach may need as many as six exposures. But the dense, intestine-packed abdominal cavity requires so much radiation for its shadow pictures that six slow exposures in succession may be dangerous for the patient.

Dr. Hodges' astronomical X-ray camera is mounted beneath a regulation X-ray table. Radiation passes through patient and table to strike a fluorescent screen that changes X rays into visible light. Below the fluorescent screen, light is gathered by lenses and concave mirror to be focused on 70-mm. film. The camera can take six exposures in a second.

Like most roentgenologists, Dr. Hodges looks forward to the day when fluorescent screens themselves will be improved. Brightened up by television techniques, they may permit the use of ordinary cameras rather than the bulky astronomer's telescope. But whatever other improvements are made in abdominal X-ray cameras, the patient will still face the unpleasant task of downing a barium highball before he poses for a picture.

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