Artronix Incorporated began in 1970 as a project in a computer science class at Washington University

Washington University in St. Louis

Washington University in St. Louis is a private research university located in suburban St. Louis, Missouri. Founded in 1853, and named for George Washington, the university has students and faculty from all fifty U.S. states and more than 110 nations...

 School of Medicine in St Louis. The class designed, built and tested a 12-bit

12-bit

Possibly the best-known 12-bit CPU is the PDP-8 and its relatives, produced in various incarnations from August 1963 to mid-1990. Many ADCs have a 12-bit resolution. Some PIC microcontrollers use a 12-bit word size....

 minicomputer

Minicomputer

A minicomputer is a class of multi-user computers that lies in the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the largest multi-user systems and the smallest single-user systems...

, which later became the PC12 minicomputer. The new company entered the bio-medical computing market with a set of peripheral

Peripheral

A peripheral is a device attached to a host computer, but not part of it, and is more or less dependent on the host. It expands the host's capabilities, but does not form part of the core computer architecture....

s and software for use in Radiation Treatment Planning and ultrasound scanning. Software for the PC12 was written in assembly language

Assembly language

An assembly language is a low-level programming language for computers, microprocessors, microcontrollers, and other programmable devices. It implements a symbolic representation of the machine codes and other constants needed to program a given CPU architecture...

 and FORTRAN

Fortran

Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...

; later software was written in MUMPS

MUMPS

MUMPS , or alternatively M, is a programming language created in the late 1960s, originally for use in the healthcare industry. It was designed for the production of multi-user database-driven applications...

. The company was located in two buildings in the Hanley Industrial Park off South Hanley Road in Maplewood, Missouri

Maplewood, Missouri

Maplewood is an inner-ring suburb of St. Louis, located in St. Louis County. The population was 8,046 at the 2010 census.-Geography:Maplewood is located at ....

.

The company later developed another product line of brain-scanning or computed tomography

Computed tomography

X-ray computed tomography or Computer tomography , is a medical imaging method employing tomography created by computer processing...

 equipment based on the Lockheed

Lockheed Corporation

The Lockheed Corporation was an American aerospace company. Lockheed was founded in 1912 and later merged with Martin Marietta to form Lockheed Martin in 1995.-Origins:...

 SUE 16-bit

16-bit

-16-bit architecture:The HP BPC, introduced in 1975, was the world's first 16-bit microprocessor. Prominent 16-bit processors include the PDP-11, Intel 8086, Intel 80286 and the WDC 65C816. The Intel 8088 was program-compatible with the Intel 8086, and was 16-bit in that its registers were 16...

 minicomputer; later designs included an optional vector processor

Vector processor

A vector processor, or array processor, is a central processing unit that implements an instruction set containing instructions that operate on one-dimensional arrays of data called vectors. This is in contrast to a scalar processor, whose instructions operate on single data items...

 using AMD Am2900 bipolar bit-slices to speed tomographic reconstruction

Tomographic reconstruction

The mathematical basis for tomographic imaging was laid down by Johann Radon. It is applied in computed tomography to obtain cross-sectional images of patients...

 calculations. In contrast to earlier designs, the Artronix scanner used a fan-shaped beam with 128 detectors on a rotating gantry. The system would take 540 degrees of data (1½ rotations) to average out noise in the samples. The beam allowed 3mm slices, but several slices would routinely be mathematically combined into one image for display purposes. The first generation of scanners was a head scanner while a later generation was a whole-body scanner. The CAT-3 (computerized axial tomography) system was a success at first, but the technology gave way to PET (positron emission tomography

Positron emission tomography

Positron emission tomography is nuclear medicine imaging technique that produces a three-dimensional image or picture of functional processes in the body. The system detects pairs of gamma rays emitted indirectly by a positron-emitting radionuclide , which is introduced into the body on a...

) and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging

Magnetic resonance imaging

Magnetic resonance imaging , nuclear magnetic resonance imaging , or magnetic resonance tomography is a medical imaging technique used in radiology to visualize detailed internal structures...

) systems. Artronix closed its doors in 1978.

Artronix was founded by Arne Roestel. Mr. Roestel went on to found Multidata Systems International

Multidata Systems International

Multidata Systems International is a maker of radiation therapy products based in St. Louis, Missouri. Their major product lines include realtime dosimetry or RTD, which includes 3D water phantoms, Film dosimetry and air scanners...

.