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Feb. 29 Brain X-Rays Assessed By Computer: A British electronics company has developed an X-ray system which it says for the first time will make the investigation of tumors and other brain disorders far more precise and will help diagnosis greatly. The machine's X-ray detectors combined with a digital computer, has been developed in the past three years by EHI. It enables vastly more information to be extracted than with conventional X-ray methods. Tests on 70 patients at Atkinson Morley's Hospital, Wimbledon, have proved successful. The investigation takes only about 10 minutes. Patients wear their own clothes and are caused no discomfort. In existing X-ray investigation of the brain the patient has to have injections and may have to be anaesthetised and spend some time in hospital. An advantage of the machine is that one operator with a modicum of special medical knowledge can screen four patients an hour. The Department of Health, whose specialists have cooperated in the development, has ordered two more machines for use in other hospitals. Mr. Godfrey Hounsfield, designer of the system, called computerized transverse axial tomography, explained that it X-rays two adjacent slices of the brain, each one centrimetre thick, by rotating round the patient's head and taking 56, 000 readings. These readings learn from each other and are fed to the computer which, solving 28, 000 simultaneous equations, builds up a matrix of 25, 000 points giving a highly accurate valuation of the material within the slices. Photo shows a patient under examination by the computer-aided brain X-ray machine

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