Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Heydarreon Welcome to Tech Stuff, I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the Tech Are You? So? Over the holiday weekend on December thirtieth, twenty twenty three, I had the occasion to get my very first CT scan. This was because I was experiencing a medical emergency. More on that later, because it's actually going to impact this show a bit, and I'm still struggling under a a few nasty effects today, so it's a little bit of a chore to do this and stay coherent. But this is first and foremost a tech podcast, not a Jonathan's All Messed Up podcast, and by golly, I owe you episode about something technical. So I thought, Hey, I've never had a CT scan before. How about I do an episode on CT scanners. Now. I have talked a bit about related medical technologies on the show, like X ray machines and MRI machines, and I've talked about tomography with regard to three D printing. That's what the T in CT stands for, stands for tomography. The C in case you're curious, stands for computed so CT is computed tomography. But unless you work with that kind of technology, knowing that probably doesn't help you out very much. To understand CT scans, we need to have a quick reminder about X rays. Now. I've talked a decent amount about X rays not that long ago, because I did an episode about how in the early twentieth century shoe shops used cabinets containing X ray lamps essentially, and then some viewfinders that would let customers see their own feet while their feet are still inside their shoesies. Well, there are plenty of reasons to suspect this was perhaps an unwise marketing campaign. After all, it did have the potential to seriously harm customers and more likely shoe store staff. The trend actually stuck around for an alarmingly long time. Anyway, there's a whole episode about this from November. It is titled AI and Radioactive Shoes Salesman if you want to learn more about that. Also, I don't think I did this on purpose, but the episode that published about those shoe salesmen went out on November eighth, twenty twenty three, and we traced the discovery of X rays back to November eighth, eighteen ninety five. So I recorded a podcast about X rays one hundred and twenty eight years to the day after their discovery. I don't remember doing that on purpose, so I'm pretty sure it was just pure luck. We have a nineteenth century smarty pants named Wilhelm Conrad Rintgen to thank for X rays. Well, not exactly, because X rays are a type of electromagnetic radiation and they exist whether or not. Rentgen figured it out, and surely someone else would have susted out if he hadn't. There were other people who were kind of looking around the area at the time. But the point is Rentgen did it, and so, gosh darn it, he deserves the credit for it. So Rentgin was experimenting with what was called a Crook's tube, a glass bulb inside which there were a pair of electrodes that could be run at high voltage, essentially a cathode ray tube, and it also was filled with more or less a vacuum. So he had covered up this tube with some heavy black cardboard. But then he saw that there was a sheet of platino barium in his lab that was several feet away, like nine feet away, and it was glowing while the tube was active, but there was no visible light passing from the tube because the cardboard was covering it up. So this got into wondering, how could this tube illuminate something if the light was being blocked by cardboard. Clearly, some form of energy was passing directly through the cardboard as if it weren't there, just as visible light can pass through a pane of glass. It wasn't long before he found out that this energy could pass through human tissue as well. In fact, it was the very same day his wife famously held her hand up and he was able to take a photograph, an X ray photograph of her hand. So if you were to hold up your hand between the tube and the sheet of platino barium, then you would cast a shadow that would show the skeletal structure of your hand, and you would have sort of a hazy area that would be other tissue in your hand. It didn't take long at all before various doctors, engineers, and scientists purposefully began to build devices to take X ray images projected again onto special film, not necessarily a sheet of platino barium, and this would let them get a little and see stuff like bones and other kinds of tissue that normally you know are on the inside of a person. As it turns out, X rays have much shorter wavelengths and much higher frequencies than visible light. So if you're looking at the electromagnetic spectrum and you go from the types of radiation that have the smallest wavelengths and you work your way up, it starts at gamma radiation, then X ray, then ultraviolet, then visible light, then infrared, then microwave, than radio from smallest to longest wavelengths, and X rays are a type of ionizing radiation, along with some other forms of radiation, like gamma radiation is also ionizing. Alpha and beta particles are ionizing. There are a few others. So ionizing radiation is radiation that has the energy required to strip electrons away from atoms right that can ionize an atom by removing electrons. This also can potential damage living cells. So most X ray radiation passes through a human body, but some of it can end up getting absorbed and potentially it can cause harm, potentially serious harm, and this potential increases with increased exposure. This is why radiologists set up a machine to take X rays and then they leave the room before they start snapping photos of your inerts. By the way, we can contrast this with non ionizing radiation. That is radiation that lacks the energy needed to strip electrons away from atoms. So your plain old radio waves, you know, the stuff that we use to communicate on cell phones and Wi Fi routers and radio and television broadcast TV, that's non ionizing radiation. Those big transmitter towers might look intimidating, but they do not have the same effect as ionizing radiation sources do. So when you hear people talk about the potential dangers for things like cell phone signals, you do need to know that the energy of those signals is orders of magnitude lower than what you would find with ionizing radiation like X ray and gamma rays. That's not to say that it's a guarantee that it's perfectly safe, just that based on that one particular vector, you are not seeing an effect. Right. It's not like if you sit too close to the TV you get cancer or something, at least not directly from sitting close to the television. All right, So we have the basics with the X ray. You've got a tube similar to a cathode ray tube, and it emits X rays when you pass a high voltage current through the filament inside the tube. It's kind of like a light bulb, but instead of giving off visible light or say ultraviolet light with a UV light, it gives off X rays. So the cathode focuses these X rays so that you can actually direct them properly. And then with an X ray machine on the opposite side from where the X ray tube is, you have a detector. Now, once upon a time, the detector was a sheet of film, right like it was contained within something else, and you would just take a photo and the X rays would go through the person and hit the film behind them, and then you develop that film and you've got your image of the X ray. But now a lot of X ray machines have digital detectors. They have a sensor on the other side that picks up those X rays, so you're not actually capturing stuff to film, you're capturing it digitally. And then once that's gone through, once the X rays have passed through and they've hit either the film or the sensor, then you have a radiologist and doctors who can look at and interpret the results. They can look at the image and determine what's going on inside. Now, the reason that I'm talking about X rays instead of CT scanners is that a CT scan is a specialized kind of X ray. A CT scanner is an X ray machine. Now you've likely seen one of these, either in person or in media. Typically it looks like you have like a little kind of white wall, like it's a machine where part of the machine is a vertical barrier kind of like a wall, and the center of it is a large hole large enough for a person to be passed through the middle of that hole, and extending out from it is a motorized bed if you're feeling generous. I thought of it just as like a table or platform, because there was nothing bed like about it. When I was on it. I laid down on this platform in my case, and a technician positioned me so that my head was at the right spot at the beginning of the hole in the center of this vertical barrier. So it's like I was slowly being fed into a doughnut hole as the process was going on. But this hole is a housing for an X ray tube and detector, and the reason for its shape. The reason why you have this round hole that you're being passed through is that the ct scan is taking a series of X ray images in a circle around you. It snaps a shot, and then the mechanism rotates inside the vertical barrier. It snaps another shot, and it does this very very very fast. If you could see through the machine, like the machine can see through you, you'd see that an X ray tube might start at a location such as directly overhead. Right, you're looking straight up, you can see the X ray tube, and then after it takes a picture, it moves slightly. Let's say it moves clockwise from your perspective, and so it's moving down the perimeter of the hole. From your perspective. You're keeping your eyes straight up, and eventually you would see the detector directly above you as it rotated one hundred and eighty degrees. So it does this a bunch of times until it has essentially gone around you, and then what results is a series of X ray images of part of your body. So in my case, it was monogan, and you get it from various angles. The CT scan generates a series of two dimensional quote unquote slices of whatever it's imaging, and these slices can range between one to ten millimeters thick. The actual thickness depends upon the specific machine in use. More than that, after gathering a full slice image, the machine can move the motorized platform forward a bit, a little further into the machine and the process can repeat. And this way the engineers can collect the number of slices needed for whatever is going on, Like if they're trying to image an entire organ, then they will keep doing this until they've hit all the slices that make up that organ. Now the images are pretty darn cool. You can look at each slice individually. That's useful if you suspect there could be something concerning in there, like a mass that shouldn't be there, for example, or you can stack them together and then collectively, with these stacked slices, you can create a three D image of whatever it was you were scanning. So that means there's a hospital here in Atlanta that has a three D scan of my brain. And no, I didn't think to ask if I could have a copy. In fact, I don't. I don't know if I actually want to see it. That might freak me out to see my own brain. All right. Anyway, now you have a basic idea of how a CT scanner works. We're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, I'm gonna answer a few other questions relating to CT scanners, some interesting facts and trivia. But before we do that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Okay, so we talked a bit about computed tomography, But what the heck does tomography mean? So tomography is using some form of penetrating energy or wave to section a three dimensional object, which is pretty much what we talked about with the imaging process just now. But there are different types of tomography. It's not all X rays. Uh. For example, I once recorded an episode about how using a particular kind of photosensitive resin and a machine that used tomography, you could three D print objects. So in this case, it's not about taking photos of a three dimensional object. Rather, it's about directing light at precise angles and positions so that this photosensitive resin solidifies when the light hits it, and you can get a very precise three D printed object from this. So a computer controlled light source zapp's the resin over and over again, and then you end up with a three D printed object. It's pretty darn cool, is not like your desktop three D printer type thing. There are lots of other applications for tomography as well, but I think most folks who have heard the term think of the medical device. So who the heck came up with this? Well, that credit goes to an engineer named Godfrey Houndsfield, and he actually didn't work in medical tech at all. Rather, he was employed by Electric and Musical Industries aka EMI. You know the record label, the same company that produced records for the Beatles, because of course that's who did it. But I'm not giving Housefield enough credit. It sounds like he was sitting there working on like turntables and cassette players. That was not the case. Before he worked for EMI. Houndsfield had worked on radar technology for the Royal Air Force, and while at EMI, he wasn't trying to make sure I want to hold your hand played at just the right speed on a turntable. He was developing guided weapons systems for EMI. That, my friend, is what you call a diversified portfolio. So the story goes that back in the nineteen sixties, Houndsfield was on vacation when he got into a conversation with the doctor, and the doctor explained that it was really hard to get a good X ray image of the human brain. Images were limited to two dimensions, and often the quality was pretty low and grainy. So Houndsfield goes on his merry way, but he keeps thinking back to this issue. Could there be a way to create a device that could produce better X ray images of structures like the brain? He essentially identified all the elements that would be needed in order to accomplish that goal. There would need to be some way to either rotate the patient, which frankly didn't seem very practical, or rotate the X ray apparatus, which seemed more achievable. There would also have to be a computer system programmed to assemble individual images together to create a three D image. These were non trivial challenges and it took him a long time, working with lots of other very smart people to make it happen, but he partnered with various neuroexperts. In nineteen seventy one, he and his team were able to build and test a CT scanner and produce the first CT scans of a human brain. Houndsfield actually received a Nobel Prize in Medicine for his contributions, and countless people have benefited from the technology since its first introduction. A CT scan can help doctors identify potential health threats like blood clots and tumors if you're scanning the brain. Obviously other stuff too. Anyway, that's just a quick overview of how CT scans work. And I apologize that this is a short episode, but I am a bit limited when it comes to researching, writing, and recording at the moment. And that brings me to why I had to have a CT scan on December thirtieth, twenty twenty three. So I've had migraine headaches on and off for a few years, but usually I just get a couple each year, like maybe like three or four, maybe five or six on a really bad year. But late last year I started getting them more frequently and I was generally feeling pretty bad. And on December thirtieth, I was feeling really bad. And normally I would just kind of try and sit things out because I'm not good about going to the doctor, but something felt so wrong that I've changed my mind, so my partner and I actually headed off to the urgent care center, so they're the urgent care center. They took my blood pressure and it was off the charts, not literally, I mean literally it was in the neighborhood of two sixty five over one thirty. But if you're familiar with blood pressure, you know that is crazy high. They urged me that I should go to an emergency room. They explained I could be at risk of a stroke. So off we rushed to the closest hospital and I check in and before long I'm brought into the CT scanner room and that's where I got my brain's pictured. I also was given an EKG for the first time, and if I ever were to consider shaving my chest, it would be because I'd be told I'd need to do another EKG, because y'all you could call me patches. Now, let's put it that way. It is not kind to the chest here. Anyway, the doctors looked after me. They told me that the EKG and the CT scans looked pretty good. There was nothing there to be of immediate concern. I was not having a stroke, but my high blood pressure is absolutely a problem. And they gave me a mic grain cocktail, which, despite the name, did not make me feel like I was in The Great Gatsby or anything like that, and they gave me some meds to bring my blood pressure down a bit. Now I'm currently on a blood pressure medication while I wait to see my doctor, which I'm gonna do in literally a couple of days. My hope is that my doctor and I can find a medication and a dosage that will help bring my blood pressure down to normal levels, because right now, the medication they have me on it's still having me deal with abnormal levels of blood pressure, and I'm still having really bad migrain headaches. I can't even lie down because if I put any pressure on my head, if my head hits a pillow or anything like that, the pain becomes intolerable. It just it adds to the pressure. So I haven't really slept much for the last few days. Anyway, this isn't a poor Me episode. I'm telling you all this for a few reasons. One is that one of the many things I need to do in order to deal with my blood pressure is I have to adjust my stress levels, and to that end, I have arranged to reduce my publication schedule for tech stuff a little bit, so I had been publishing five times a week seven times a week toward the end of twenty twenty three, but I'm going to switch back to three times a week, which longtime listeners will know that's what I used to do, but I'm going back to that. And my thought is that if I can get things in a good rhythm, I want to do two standard Tech Stuff episodes and then on Fridays maybe do a news round up episode. I also still have a ton of classic episode intros and outros recorded and ready to go, so my hope is to actually reserve those for days when either my health isn't cooperating and I simply cannot record, or if maybe I'm on vacation or something. So I hope you all understand for at least a month or two, we're going to have a lighter schedule than normal. And the other reason I'm telling you all all this is because I'm one of those folks who very reluctantly goes to the doctor. I have no good reason for this. I got a lot of really bad reasons, but none of them are good. They range from en Zo to being used to a time when my partner and I could not easily make our way to the doctor. So we did without. But the point is, I have these resources available to me now, and it's dumb for me not to take advantage of them. And I realized lots of people aren't fortunate to be in a position where they can easily seek medical care, and it's insulting that I took it for granted when I did so. Had I been going to a doctor regularly, I might have caught the blood pressure problem ages ago. I could already be treating it. Maybe I would have prevented the trip to the er, as well as the terrible migraines that I'm fighting now. So this is really just me urging all of y'all out there. I love you guys. Okay, if you have access to doctors but you're not really taking advantage of it, please consider getting out of that rut. I know it's hard because I've been there. I was in that same rut for years and it was actually a matter of great shame to me. It was hard to even think about. I knew rationally that I needed to be going to a doctor, and yet I wasn't doing it. And so I'm paying for that now. And I realize that not everyone has that kind of access, and that stinks. I'm fully in support of making healthcare accessible and affordable to everyone. It's not just the right thing to do for the individual person, it also ends up being right for society. Because healthy people are more productive, then they place less of a demand on society's resources. So healthcare is an investment that actually does pay off for everybody, not just the patient. But enough of my soapboxing, so there may be some inconsistency with publication in the near future. My plan is to publish on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, but there may be days where I slip earlier. Today, for example, I couldn't even imagine sitting at my desk and writing or recording this episode. I was in way too much pain. But my hope is that once my doctor and I dial in the meds I need, and I start making some lifestyle changes that help support those meds, I'll be back to normal, or as close to normal as I get anyway. In the meantime, thank you all so much for listening. I hope you have an amazing new year, and I promise that I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Heydarreon Welcome to Tech Stuff, I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the Tech Are You? So? Over the holiday weekend on December thirtieth, twenty twenty three, I had the occasion to get my very first CT scan. This was because I was experiencing a medical emergency. More on that later, because it's actually going to impact this show a bit, and I'm still struggling under a a few nasty effects today, so it's a little bit of a chore to do this and stay coherent. But this is first and foremost a tech podcast, not a Jonathan's All Messed Up podcast, and by golly, I owe you episode about something technical. So I thought, Hey, I've never had a CT scan before. How about I do an episode on CT scanners. Now. I have talked a bit about related medical technologies on the show, like X ray machines and MRI machines, and I've talked about tomography with regard to three D printing. That's what the T in CT stands for, stands for tomography. The C in case you're curious, stands for computed so CT is computed tomography. But unless you work with that kind of technology, knowing that probably doesn't help you out very much. To understand CT scans, we need to have a quick reminder about X rays. Now. I've talked a decent amount about X rays not that long ago, because I did an episode about how in the early twentieth century shoe shops used cabinets containing X ray lamps essentially, and then some viewfinders that would let customers see their own feet while their feet are still inside their shoesies. Well, there are plenty of reasons to suspect this was perhaps an unwise marketing campaign. After all, it did have the potential to seriously harm customers and more likely shoe store staff. The trend actually stuck around for an alarmingly long time. Anyway, there's a whole episode about this from November. It is titled AI and Radioactive Shoes Salesman if you want to learn more about that. Also, I don't think I did this on purpose, but the episode that published about those shoe salesmen went out on November eighth, twenty twenty three, and we traced the discovery of X rays back to November eighth, eighteen ninety five. So I recorded a podcast about X rays one hundred and twenty eight years to the day after their discovery. I don't remember doing that on purpose, so I'm pretty sure it was just pure luck. We have a nineteenth century smarty pants named Wilhelm Conrad Rintgen to thank for X rays. Well, not exactly, because X rays are a type of electromagnetic radiation and they exist whether or not. Rentgen figured it out, and surely someone else would have susted out if he hadn't. There were other people who were kind of looking around the area at the time. But the point is Rentgen did it, and so, gosh darn it, he deserves the credit for it. So Rentgin was experimenting with what was called a Crook's tube, a glass bulb inside which there were a pair of electrodes that could be run at high voltage, essentially a cathode ray tube, and it also was filled with more or less a vacuum. So he had covered up this tube with some heavy black cardboard. But then he saw that there was a sheet of platino barium in his lab that was several feet away, like nine feet away, and it was glowing while the tube was active, but there was no visible light passing from the tube because the cardboard was covering it up. So this got into wondering, how could this tube illuminate something if the light was being blocked by cardboard. Clearly, some form of energy was passing directly through the cardboard as if it weren't there, just as visible light can pass through a pane of glass. It wasn't long before he found out that this energy could pass through human tissue as well. In fact, it was the very same day his wife famously held her hand up and he was able to take a photograph, an X ray photograph of her hand. So if you were to hold up your hand between the tube and the sheet of platino barium, then you would cast a shadow that would show the skeletal structure of your hand, and you would have sort of a hazy area that would be other tissue in your hand. It didn't take long at all before various doctors, engineers, and scientists purposefully began to build devices to take X ray images projected again onto special film, not necessarily a sheet of platino barium, and this would let them get a little and see stuff like bones and other kinds of tissue that normally you know are on the inside of a person. As it turns out, X rays have much shorter wavelengths and much higher frequencies than visible light. So if you're looking at the electromagnetic spectrum and you go from the types of radiation that have the smallest wavelengths and you work your way up, it starts at gamma radiation, then X ray, then ultraviolet, then visible light, then infrared, then microwave, than radio from smallest to longest wavelengths, and X rays are a type of ionizing radiation, along with some other forms of radiation, like gamma radiation is also ionizing. Alpha and beta particles are ionizing. There are a few others. So ionizing radiation is radiation that has the energy required to strip electrons away from atoms right that can ionize an atom by removing electrons. This also can potential damage living cells. So most X ray radiation passes through a human body, but some of it can end up getting absorbed and potentially it can cause harm, potentially serious harm, and this potential increases with increased exposure. This is why radiologists set up a machine to take X rays and then they leave the room before they start snapping photos of your inerts. By the way, we can contrast this with non ionizing radiation. That is radiation that lacks the energy needed to strip electrons away from atoms. So your plain old radio waves, you know, the stuff that we use to communicate on cell phones and Wi Fi routers and radio and television broadcast TV, that's non ionizing radiation. Those big transmitter towers might look intimidating, but they do not have the same effect as ionizing radiation sources do. So when you hear people talk about the potential dangers for things like cell phone signals, you do need to know that the energy of those signals is orders of magnitude lower than what you would find with ionizing radiation like X ray and gamma rays. That's not to say that it's a guarantee that it's perfectly safe, just that based on that one particular vector, you are not seeing an effect. Right. It's not like if you sit too close to the TV you get cancer or something, at least not directly from sitting close to the television. All right, So we have the basics with the X ray. You've got a tube similar to a cathode ray tube, and it emits X rays when you pass a high voltage current through the filament inside the tube. It's kind of like a light bulb, but instead of giving off visible light or say ultraviolet light with a UV light, it gives off X rays. So the cathode focuses these X rays so that you can actually direct them properly. And then with an X ray machine on the opposite side from where the X ray tube is, you have a detector. Now, once upon a time, the detector was a sheet of film, right like it was contained within something else, and you would just take a photo and the X rays would go through the person and hit the film behind them, and then you develop that film and you've got your image of the X ray. But now a lot of X ray machines have digital detectors. They have a sensor on the other side that picks up those X rays, so you're not actually capturing stuff to film, you're capturing it digitally. And then once that's gone through, once the X rays have passed through and they've hit either the film or the sensor, then you have a radiologist and doctors who can look at and interpret the results. They can look at the image and determine what's going on inside. Now, the reason that I'm talking about X rays instead of CT scanners is that a CT scan is a specialized kind of X ray. A CT scanner is an X ray machine. Now you've likely seen one of these, either in person or in media. Typically it looks like you have like a little kind of white wall, like it's a machine where part of the machine is a vertical barrier kind of like a wall, and the center of it is a large hole large enough for a person to be passed through the middle of that hole, and extending out from it is a motorized bed if you're feeling generous. I thought of it just as like a table or platform, because there was nothing bed like about it. When I was on it. I laid down on this platform in my case, and a technician positioned me so that my head was at the right spot at the beginning of the hole in the center of this vertical barrier. So it's like I was slowly being fed into a doughnut hole as the process was going on. But this hole is a housing for an X ray tube and detector, and the reason for its shape. The reason why you have this round hole that you're being passed through is that the ct scan is taking a series of X ray images in a circle around you. It snaps a shot, and then the mechanism rotates inside the vertical barrier. It snaps another shot, and it does this very very very fast. If you could see through the machine, like the machine can see through you, you'd see that an X ray tube might start at a location such as directly overhead. Right, you're looking straight up, you can see the X ray tube, and then after it takes a picture, it moves slightly. Let's say it moves clockwise from your perspective, and so it's moving down the perimeter of the hole. From your perspective. You're keeping your eyes straight up, and eventually you would see the detector directly above you as it rotated one hundred and eighty degrees. So it does this a bunch of times until it has essentially gone around you, and then what results is a series of X ray images of part of your body. So in my case, it was monogan, and you get it from various angles. The CT scan generates a series of two dimensional quote unquote slices of whatever it's imaging, and these slices can range between one to ten millimeters thick. The actual thickness depends upon the specific machine in use. More than that, after gathering a full slice image, the machine can move the motorized platform forward a bit, a little further into the machine and the process can repeat. And this way the engineers can collect the number of slices needed for whatever is going on, Like if they're trying to image an entire organ, then they will keep doing this until they've hit all the slices that make up that organ. Now the images are pretty darn cool. You can look at each slice individually. That's useful if you suspect there could be something concerning in there, like a mass that shouldn't be there, for example, or you can stack them together and then collectively, with these stacked slices, you can create a three D image of whatever it was you were scanning. So that means there's a hospital here in Atlanta that has a three D scan of my brain. And no, I didn't think to ask if I could have a copy. In fact, I don't. I don't know if I actually want to see it. That might freak me out to see my own brain. All right. Anyway, now you have a basic idea of how a CT scanner works. We're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, I'm gonna answer a few other questions relating to CT scanners, some interesting facts and trivia. But before we do that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Okay, so we talked a bit about computed tomography, But what the heck does tomography mean? So tomography is using some form of penetrating energy or wave to section a three dimensional object, which is pretty much what we talked about with the imaging process just now. But there are different types of tomography. It's not all X rays. Uh. For example, I once recorded an episode about how using a particular kind of photosensitive resin and a machine that used tomography, you could three D print objects. So in this case, it's not about taking photos of a three dimensional object. Rather, it's about directing light at precise angles and positions so that this photosensitive resin solidifies when the light hits it, and you can get a very precise three D printed object from this. So a computer controlled light source zapp's the resin over and over again, and then you end up with a three D printed object. It's pretty darn cool, is not like your desktop three D printer type thing. There are lots of other applications for tomography as well, but I think most folks who have heard the term think of the medical device. So who the heck came up with this? Well, that credit goes to an engineer named Godfrey Houndsfield, and he actually didn't work in medical tech at all. Rather, he was employed by Electric and Musical Industries aka EMI. You know the record label, the same company that produced records for the Beatles, because of course that's who did it. But I'm not giving Housefield enough credit. It sounds like he was sitting there working on like turntables and cassette players. That was not the case. Before he worked for EMI. Houndsfield had worked on radar technology for the Royal Air Force, and while at EMI, he wasn't trying to make sure I want to hold your hand played at just the right speed on a turntable. He was developing guided weapons systems for EMI. That, my friend, is what you call a diversified portfolio. So the story goes that back in the nineteen sixties, Houndsfield was on vacation when he got into a conversation with the doctor, and the doctor explained that it was really hard to get a good X ray image of the human brain. Images were limited to two dimensions, and often the quality was pretty low and grainy. So Houndsfield goes on his merry way, but he keeps thinking back to this issue. Could there be a way to create a device that could produce better X ray images of structures like the brain? He essentially identified all the elements that would be needed in order to accomplish that goal. There would need to be some way to either rotate the patient, which frankly didn't seem very practical, or rotate the X ray apparatus, which seemed more achievable. There would also have to be a computer system programmed to assemble individual images together to create a three D image. These were non trivial challenges and it took him a long time, working with lots of other very smart people to make it happen, but he partnered with various neuroexperts. In nineteen seventy one, he and his team were able to build and test a CT scanner and produce the first CT scans of a human brain. Houndsfield actually received a Nobel Prize in Medicine for his contributions, and countless people have benefited from the technology since its first introduction. A CT scan can help doctors identify potential health threats like blood clots and tumors if you're scanning the brain. Obviously other stuff too. Anyway, that's just a quick overview of how CT scans work. And I apologize that this is a short episode, but I am a bit limited when it comes to researching, writing, and recording at the moment. And that brings me to why I had to have a CT scan on December thirtieth, twenty twenty three. So I've had migraine headaches on and off for a few years, but usually I just get a couple each year, like maybe like three or four, maybe five or six on a really bad year. But late last year I started getting them more frequently and I was generally feeling pretty bad. And on December thirtieth, I was feeling really bad. And normally I would just kind of try and sit things out because I'm not good about going to the doctor, but something felt so wrong that I've changed my mind, so my partner and I actually headed off to the urgent care center, so they're the urgent care center. They took my blood pressure and it was off the charts, not literally, I mean literally it was in the neighborhood of two sixty five over one thirty. But if you're familiar with blood pressure, you know that is crazy high. They urged me that I should go to an emergency room. They explained I could be at risk of a stroke. So off we rushed to the closest hospital and I check in and before long I'm brought into the CT scanner room and that's where I got my brain's pictured. I also was given an EKG for the first time, and if I ever were to consider shaving my chest, it would be because I'd be told I'd need to do another EKG, because y'all you could call me patches. Now, let's put it that way. It is not kind to the chest here. Anyway, the doctors looked after me. They told me that the EKG and the CT scans looked pretty good. There was nothing there to be of immediate concern. I was not having a stroke, but my high blood pressure is absolutely a problem. And they gave me a mic grain cocktail, which, despite the name, did not make me feel like I was in The Great Gatsby or anything like that, and they gave me some meds to bring my blood pressure down a bit. Now I'm currently on a blood pressure medication while I wait to see my doctor, which I'm gonna do in literally a couple of days. My hope is that my doctor and I can find a medication and a dosage that will help bring my blood pressure down to normal levels, because right now, the medication they have me on it's still having me deal with abnormal levels of blood pressure, and I'm still having really bad migrain headaches. I can't even lie down because if I put any pressure on my head, if my head hits a pillow or anything like that, the pain becomes intolerable. It just it adds to the pressure. So I haven't really slept much for the last few days. Anyway, this isn't a poor Me episode. I'm telling you all this for a few reasons. One is that one of the many things I need to do in order to deal with my blood pressure is I have to adjust my stress levels, and to that end, I have arranged to reduce my publication schedule for tech stuff a little bit, so I had been publishing five times a week seven times a week toward the end of twenty twenty three, but I'm going to switch back to three times a week, which longtime listeners will know that's what I used to do, but I'm going back to that. And my thought is that if I can get things in a good rhythm, I want to do two standard Tech Stuff episodes and then on Fridays maybe do a news round up episode. I also still have a ton of classic episode intros and outros recorded and ready to go, so my hope is to actually reserve those for days when either my health isn't cooperating and I simply cannot record, or if maybe I'm on vacation or something. So I hope you all understand for at least a month or two, we're going to have a lighter schedule than normal. And the other reason I'm telling you all all this is because I'm one of those folks who very reluctantly goes to the doctor. I have no good reason for this. I got a lot of really bad reasons, but none of them are good. They range from en Zo to being used to a time when my partner and I could not easily make our way to the doctor. So we did without. But the point is, I have these resources available to me now, and it's dumb for me not to take advantage of them. And I realized lots of people aren't fortunate to be in a position where they can easily seek medical care, and it's insulting that I took it for granted when I did so. Had I been going to a doctor regularly, I might have caught the blood pressure problem ages ago. I could already be treating it. Maybe I would have prevented the trip to the er, as well as the terrible migraines that I'm fighting now. So this is really just me urging all of y'all out there. I love you guys. Okay, if you have access to doctors but you're not really taking advantage of it, please consider getting out of that rut. I know it's hard because I've been there. I was in that same rut for years and it was actually a matter of great shame to me. It was hard to even think about. I knew rationally that I needed to be going to a doctor, and yet I wasn't doing it. And so I'm paying for that now. And I realize that not everyone has that kind of access, and that stinks. I'm fully in support of making healthcare accessible and affordable to everyone. It's not just the right thing to do for the individual person, it also ends up being right for society. Because healthy people are more productive, then they place less of a demand on society's resources. So healthcare is an investment that actually does pay off for everybody, not just the patient. But enough of my soapboxing, so there may be some inconsistency with publication in the near future. My plan is to publish on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, but there may be days where I slip earlier. Today, for example, I couldn't even imagine sitting at my desk and writing or recording this episode. I was in way too much pain. But my hope is that once my doctor and I dial in the meds I need, and I start making some lifestyle changes that help support those meds, I'll be back to normal, or as close to normal as I get anyway. In the meantime, thank you all so much for listening. I hope you have an amazing new year, and I promise that I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.