Artronix Incorporated began in 1970 and has roots in a project in a computer science class at

Washington University Washington University in St. Louis (WashU or WUSTL) is a private research university with its main campus in St. Louis County, and Clayton, Missouri. Founded in 1853, the university is named after George Washington. Washington University is r ...

School of Medicine in

St Louis St. Louis () is the second-largest city in Missouri, United States. It sits near the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers. In 2020, the city proper had a population of 301,578, while the bi-state metropolitan area, which e ...

. The class designed, built and tested a

12-bit Possibly the best-known 12-bit CPU is the PDP-8 and its relatives, such as the Intersil 6100 microprocessor produced in various forms from August 1963 to mid-1990. Many analog to digital converters (ADCs) have a 12-bit resolution. Some PIC micr ...

minicomputer A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a class of smaller general purpose computers that developed in the mid-1960s and sold at a much lower price than mainframe and mid-size computers from IBM and its direct competitors. In a 1970 survey, ...

, which later evolved to become the

PC12 minicomputer PC12 by Artronix was a minicomputer built with 7400-series TTL technology and ferrite core memory. Computers were manufactured at the Artronix facility in suburban St. Louis, Missouri. The instruction set architecture was adapted from the LINC ...

. The new company entered the bio-medical computing market with a set of

peripheral A peripheral or peripheral device is an auxiliary device used to put information into and get information out of a computer. The term ''peripheral device'' refers to all hardware components that are attached to a computer and are controlled by the ...

s and

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

for use in Radiation Treatment Planning (se
full article
an
abstract
and ultrasound scanning. Software for the PC12 was written in

assembly language In computer programming, assembly language (or assembler language, or symbolic machine code), often referred to simply as Assembly and commonly abbreviated as ASM or asm, is any low-level programming language with a very strong correspondence be ...

and FORTRAN; later software was written in

MUMPS MUMPS ("Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System"), or M, is an imperative, high-level programming language with an integrated transaction processing key–value database. It was originally developed at Massachusetts Gener ...

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

Maplewood, Missouri Maplewood is an inner-ring suburb of St. Louis, located in St. Louis County, Missouri, United States. History Maplewood was established around the turn of the 20th century. Maplewood was one of the early suburbs of St. Louis. Located just outside ...

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

computed tomography A computed tomography scan (CT scan; formerly called computed axial tomography scan or CAT scan) is a medical imaging technique used to obtain detailed internal images of the body. The personnel that perform CT scans are called radiographers ...

equipment based on the Lockheed SUE

16-bit 16-bit microcomputers are microcomputers that use 16-bit microprocessors. A 16-bit register can store 216 different values. The range of integer values that can be stored in 16 bits depends on the integer representation used. With the two mos ...

minicomputer (see also

Pluribus The Pluribus''Pluribus'' is the ablative plural of the Latin word for "more" or "above." multiprocessor was an early multi-processor computer designed by BBN for use as a packet switch in the ARPANET. Its design later influenced the BBN Butterf ...

); later designs included an optional

vector processor In computing, a vector processor or array processor is a central processing unit (CPU) that implements an instruction set where its instructions are designed to operate efficiently and effectively on large one-dimensional arrays of data called ...

using

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. While it initially manufactur ...

Am2900 Am2900 is a family of integrated circuits (ICs) created in 1975 by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). They were constructed with bipolar devices, in a bit-slice topology, and were designed to be used as modular components each representing a different ...

bipolar bit-slices to speed

tomographic reconstruction Tomographic reconstruction is a type of multidimensional inverse problem where the challenge is to yield an estimate of a specific system from a finite number of projections. The mathematical basis for tomographic imaging was laid down by Johann ...

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 torso (whole-body) scanner. The CAT-3 ( computerized axial tomography) system was a success at first, but the technology surrendered ground to PET (

positron emission tomography Positron emission tomography (PET) is a functional imaging technique that uses radioactive substances known as radiotracers to visualize and measure changes in Metabolism, metabolic processes, and in other physiological activities including bl ...

) and MRI (

magnetic resonance imaging Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a medical imaging technique used in radiology to form pictures of the anatomy and the physiological processes of the body. MRI scanners use strong magnetic fields, magnetic field gradients, and radio wave ...

) systems. Artronix closed its doors in 1978. A video of the Artronix torso scanner operating without a shroud is available on YouTube a
Commissie NVvRadiologie
with narration in Dutch. Artronix was founded by Arne Roestel. Mr. Roestel went on to found

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. Since 2003, Multi ...

. For his leadership of Artronix, Mr. Roestel was named as th
Small Businessman of the Year for Missouri
in 1976 by the Small Business Administration and was hosted at a luncheon by President Gerald Ford (source: Ford Library Museum).

References

# # Link broken when tested on 2017-07-13. Electronics companies of the United States Companies based in Missouri {{Compu-hardware-stub