I can see through you

At one time the frail condition of the elderly Soviet elite gave an impetus to domestic medicine that keeps it going even now.

Awarding a Nobel Prize to the inven­tors of magnetic-resonance tomography all but overshadowed a little Russian ju­bilee: A quarter century ago, the country’s first computer tomographs were launched in Moscow. This happened just five years after a new diagnostic research method was invented, and a year before Allan M. Cormack and Godfrey Hounsfield, the methodology authors, were awarded a Nobel Prize for medicine. Have we since kept up with “diagnostic progress”? How safe is the new procedure? Professor Sergey Ternovoy, head of the radiation diagnostics and therapy department at the Moscow Sechenov Medical Academy and member of the Russian Academy of Med­ical Sciences, is interviewed by a MN’s correspondent.

“The pre-computer era of medical di­agnostics is subdivided into two stages: before the discovery of X-rays and after,” Sergei Temovoy says. “X-rays helped look inside the human organism. By the 1970s the method had largely outlived its use­fulness. In particular, it seemed that the human brain, safely covered by the crani­um, would never been seen. And then came a breakthrough: Godfrey Houn­sfield, an employee with a British plate making company, created a device to study the brain. An X-ray gener­ated image was processed by the computer, and there it was -the picture. Sev­eral years later, the method was widely used to study the whole organism - the liver, the kidneys, the mediastinum, the vessels, etc. Incidentally, magnetic-reso­nance tomography is also a spin-off of the breakthrough made at the time: Basically the same mathematical modeling methods are used both in this and other mod­ern technologies (digital ultrasonic diag­nostics or isotope diagnostics).”

What is striking is the speed with which the innovation was tapped in this country, behind the Iron Curtain.

The fact is that specialists had been monitoring the latest developments. I for one saw a film about die new procedure at an exhibition, Hospital 1974. At die time, the 4^th Main Administration of die Health Ministry was headed by Yevgeny Chazov. He saw at once what opportuni­ties were opened by that discovery. Some of the leading healthcare providers in the Soviet Union served members of the Cab­inet and the Politburo, including the Cen­tral Clinical Hospital of the 4^th Main Ad­ministration [popularly known as the Kremlin hospital. — Ed.) and the Institute of-Neurology. Two machines were bought for them and went into operation in 1978.

You were the one who mastered the new methodology at the Kremlin hospital. Do you remember your first patient?

It was the president of a state in North Africa. We had examined him even before the equip­ment was officially “launched,” which did not happen until after it was thoroughly checked by KGB experts. They re­peatedly turned it on and off, operating it in vari­ous modes to make sure that there were no bugs: After all, the country’s top leaders were to be examined there.