Computerised tomography was introduced in the 1970s. In the early days, scans could be either axial, coronal or saggital – each type named after the plane (of the body) in which it was taken. It appears that each scanner could only work in one plane, and the most commonly used one was the axial plane; hence the scans were axial and the scanners were computerised axial tomography (CAT) scanners. More recent machines can produce images in any one of the three planes, and tend to be known simply as computerised tomography (CT) scanners.
© Haydn Thompson 2018