Medicine: Colored X-Rays

Dean Milton Charles Winternitz of Yale’s Medical School was as happy as any preceptor could be last week. One of his proteges, Luther George Simjian, had just announced perfection of a device which: 1) produces colored x-ray images of internal organs, 2) visualizes highly transparent organs, 3) utilizes harmless, weak x-ray beams. 4) allows the colored images to “be sent by wire to any place the examining doctor may be.

Inventor Simjian conceived the apparatus while he was director of the Medical School’s photographic laboratories. Leaving Yale, the well-to-do young Armenian built a model of the x-ray observation ap paratus and as soon as he saw that it worked, disassembled it. Last week he regretted his act. when Surgeon William Rose of Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center asked permission to use the Simjian device first. Mr. Simjian, about to sail for England, promised to build another in autumn.

When the device is in operation the patient stands so that the x-rays throw shadows of his bones and viscera upon a fluoroscopic screen. A television scanning disk looks over the grey shadows piece meal, lets them illuminate three photo electric cells. One cell responds only to heavy shadows, another to light shadows, the third to medium greys. In turn one cell activates a red neon tube, another a yellow helium tube, the third a blue mercury tube. Lenses combine those col ors and a second scanning disk synchronized with the first paints a colored x-ray image on a screen. Dark greys become red. light greys blue, medium greys yellow. An amplifying system allows the operator to intensify any color he pleases and bring into view hitherto invisible organs.

“Tests indicate that the diagnostician can be more certain than ever before of recognizing a cancer or benign tumor in its early stage,” said Inventor Simjian. “Another very important point is that for the first time it becomes possible to illuminate blood vessels.” Among other photographic devices invented by Mr. Simjian are a fogged silver screen for projecting microscopic photographs, a self-focusing camera, an automatic developing tank, a system of mirrors and a camera with which a subject can photograph any desired aspect of his face, and a set of mirrors for dress and hat shops inside which the customer stands while she sees her figure or head slowly revolve.