|
Manuel Dias de Abreu (January 4, 1894 – January 30, 1962) was a Brazilian physician and scientist, the inventor of ''abreugraphy'', a rapid radiography of the lungs for screening tuberculosis. He is considered one of the most important Brazilian physicians, side by side with Carlos Chagas, Vital Brazil and Oswaldo Cruz. == Early career == Abreu was born in São Paulo, Brazil, and obtained his M.D. in medicine at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in 1914. Shortly afterwards, he travelled to France, where he first worked in the service of Dr. Louis Gaston, at the Nouvel Hôpital de la Pitié, in 1915. Charged with photographing surgical pathology specimens, Abreu quickly developed new and better devices and methods for this. In 1916, Abreu started to work at the Hôtel-Dieu and had his first contact with medical radiography, which had been discovered by the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen just 20 years before. He became the director of the laboratory of radiology of the hospital in substitution to the previous director, Dr. Jean Guilleminot, who was conscripted to fight in the First World War. It was in this position, by suggestion of Guilleminot, that Abreu became interest in fluorography, or the photographic recording of fluoroscopic x-ray images of the lungs. He soon was able to perceive the immense diagnostic value of these images for tuberculosis and other pulmonary affections, and he began his photographic studies of the lungs in 1918, now at the Laennec Hospital (also in France). Abreu's first landmark contribution to the radiography of soft tissues (until then not much utilized as a diagnostic radiographical method, due to the low definition of images) was to develop a x-ray densitometry method, by comparing the degree of white density of biological tissues to water's and to other highly dense references, such as bones, and to point out its value for radiodiagnosis. In 1921 he first published his pioneering work on the radiological interpretation of pulmonary injuries in pleuropulmonary tuberculosis, titled ''"Le Radiodiagnostic dans la Tuberculose Pleuro-Pulmonaire"''. This and his method of pulmonary densitometry gave him an invitation to join the prestigious Académie de Médicine de Paris. In 1922 Abreu returned to Brazil and accepted a post as the head of the X-Ray Department at the Federal public health service for the prophylaxis of tuberculosis in Rio de Janeiro. The city was at that time going through a devastating epidemic of tuberculosis. He intensified research on thoracic radiography for the purpose of early diagnosis of tubercular lesions, but the results were initially discouraging, due to the low quality of fluroscopic images at the time. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Manuel de Abreu」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|