The history of neuroimaging

My interest in the brain started long before I was a radiographer reporting CT head scans. When I was still a baby, my father experienced episodes of losing consciousness and underwent various examinations over four months. The diagnosis was made more difficult by two factors: one, that he had forgotten to mention that he had bumped his head; and, two, it was 1970 and before the invention of the CT scanner. The doctors initially thought it was a heart problem, later excluded, and it took a cerebral angiogram to eventually identify a subdural haematoma causing midline shift and displacing the vessels to one side. Burr holes were proposed and carried out with a hand drill and local anaesthetic.

Nowadays it’s easy to take for granted modern imaging techniques but, looking back on the history of neuroimaging and diagnostic techniques, we realise that diagnosing brain pathologies...