User:Dinosawyer/Sandbox/Artronix

Artronix Incorporated began in the late 1960s as a small manufacturer of motion-sensing burglar alarms. The company subsequently made important advances in the use of computers in medicine, but is no longer in business.

Burglar alarms were initially built in Mr. Roestel's kitchen, but the company subsequently moved to 716 Hanley Industrial Court in the Hanley Industrial Park off South Hanley Road in Maplewood, Missouri.

Around 1970 Mr. Roestel was approached by Dr. Jerome R. Cox of the Washington University Biomedical Computer Laboratory to build a 12-bit minicomputer which later became the PC12 minicomputer.

The company entered the bio-medical computing market with a set of specialized peripherals and software for use in Radiation Treatment Planning and ultrasound scanning. Software for the PC12 was written in assembly language and FORTRAN; later software for patient billing and database applications was written in MUMPS. As business expanded, Artronix moved to a larger building at 1314 Hanley Industrial Park (by coincidence, 1314 is the octal equivalent of the prior address 716).

The company later developed another product line of brain-scanning or computed tomography equipment based on the Lockheed SUE 16-bit minicomputer; later designs included an optional vector processor using AMD Am2900 bipolar bit-slices to speed tomographic reconstruction 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 (1-1/2 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. To provide the additional space needed to manufacture whole-body scanners, the company moved to Chesterfield, Missouri.

The CAT-3 (computerized axial tomography) system was a success at first, but the technology gave way to PET (positron emission tomography} and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) systems. Artronix closed its doors in 1978.