Science: 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...

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