BODY-SCANNER

noun (Health and Fitness) (Science and Technology) A scanning X-ray machine which uses computer technology to produce cross-sectional pictures (tomographs) of the body's internal state from a series of X-ray pictures. Etymology: Formed by compounding: a scanner which produces pictures of the whole body. History and Usage: The body-scanner (at first called a whole-body scanner or total body scanner) was developed by EMI in 1975, using the same technology as had been used to produce the brain scanner a few years earlier. It was immediately welcomed as a powerful diagnostic tool, especially since it was capable of showing up tumours in all parts of the body while they were still at an early stage of development. During the eighties the body-scanner became commonplace in the US, but its high price made it a rarer acquisition in the National Health Service in the UK. As the technology of ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging (see MRI) have developed, the term body-scanner has been extended in colloquial use to cover all kinds of machines which scan the body and compute cross-sectional pictures of its inside. The studies could also give a better understanding of crystals, which are widely used in electronics, and of magnetism, which is exploited in many body scanners. Sunday Times 6 May 1990, section D, p. 15