Nobel Prize Winner Cormack Backs Scanner Despite Cost

Tufts University physicist Allan M. Cormack, who won the 1979 Nobel Prize foe medicine for his development of a sophisticated x-ray machine, said yesterday that despite the device's high cost, every major hospital ought to have one.

The machine, known as the computed axial tomography scanner (CAT), allows doctors to take three-dimensional x-rays of a patient through the use of a rotating x-ray tube.

The cost of a CAT scanner ranges from $500,000 to $750,000. Critics of the device say it is too expensive and that its use is responsible in part for the high cost of health care.

According to Calvin L. Rumbaugh, director of Neuroradiology at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital and Beth-Israel Hospital, Harvard-affiliated teaching hospitals, together own five of the machines.

"Every hospital is going to have to have at least one if they are going to deliver first class medical care," Rumbaugh said yesterday. The device "is a tremendous diagnostic tool which has "almost revolutionized the treatment of injuries such as head trauma," he added.

Traumatic

In the past, hospitals had to perform painful, dangerous and expensive tests known as angiograms on patients with head trauma. "Now any hospital can get the same information in a few minutes without danger to the patient. We're saving lives with this," Rumbaugh said.

The government is partially to blame for the high cost of the machine, he said. It stopped buying CATs just as scores of new companies entered the market. These new companies went bankrupt without government patronage and the remaining companies began charging more, Rumbaugh added.

Cormack said he believes physicians' demands for improvements in the device were responsible for keeping the prices high. Doctors, he said, continually asked for "the new and improved model" and this naturally drove up development costs.

Cormack shares his prize which was announced Thursday with British engineer Godfrey N. Housfield who designed the first working CAT scanner for EMI, a British company.

Cormack said that he and Hounsfield have never met and did not collaborate on the project. "I'm not sure if he even read my articles," he added.

Cormack, who was born in South Africa in 1924, is now an American citizen. He came to the United States in 1956 to work at Harvard's cyclotron laboratory as a research fellow with Norman F. Ramsey, Higgins Professor of Physics.

Cormack returned to Harvard's cyclotron in 1963 to carry out one of the experiments which lead to the development of the CAT scanning process, because only Harvard could supply the cobalt 60 needed to confirm his theories.

Andreas M. Koehler, assistant director of the cyclotron, said yesterday Cormack is still a frequent visitor to the laboratory. "We were all absolutely delighted when we heard of his award," Koehler said.

Cormack's award is unusual in two respects: he has never received a doctorate in any scientific field and he is primarily concerned not with medicine but with particle physics. He described his work on the CAT scanner as "a hobby."

Cormack first left South Africa because Harvard offered him a position. Although he was not very happy about the political situation in his country, "it wasn't a primary consideration" in leaving, he said.