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Electrococleography

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Dr. Hallowell Davis, my Professor of Neurophysiology, was the father of electrical response audiometry.  In 1955 he invited Jerome C. Cox to join the Research Department of the Central Institute for the Deaf as an acoustic engineer, and pointed him in the direction of an average response calculator to detect electroencephalographic responses. With the help of his student Maynard Engebretson, Jerry Cox designed and constructed a special digital computer that was named HAVOC – Histogram, Average and Ojive Calculator, which started electric response audiometry. He also developed methods for bioelectric signals, mathematical analysis of the averaging process and sample statistics of the evoked responses. Jerry Cox eventually became the Chairman of the Computer Laboratories of Washington University in Saint Louis. When I visited  Saint Louis in 1964, Dr. Davis was already recording the vertex potentials of the CID children. These children knew the researchers, who always treat...

The Beatles and Computerized Tomography

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Dr. Feres Secaf was my Professor of Radiology when I was studying Medicine at Escola Paulista de Medicina. Naturally, there are no more professors of Radiology; the area has expanded to include ultrasonography, magnetic resonance, etc., so the medical specialty is now called Medical Imaging. Prof. Secaf was one of the pioneers of Computerized Tomography in Brazil. He once  told me that the Beatles were intensely involved with the development of Computerized Tomography. In fact, he told me this story before the technique became  generally available. I have found some vague references about the Beatles in relation with CT scans, but no conclusions could be found, and there are also suggestions that the whole thing was just fiction. But the story that Prof. Secaf told me had some interesting details. It was well known  that the Beatles had their own recording studio, called Apple – nothing to do with the present day Apple Computers and iPhones. The Apple Recording Comp...

Our Book Has Been Published!

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Our aim was quite ambitious: we wanted to present what is new in Neurotology and, at the same time, express our Latin American experience in the specialty. And we wanted to emphasize the contributions of the recent neurophysiological advances to clinical Neurotology.  If you want to have a glimpse of our book, or even read a few pages, press one of the links that appear in the bottom of the page. Or press each one, one at a time.   We enjoyed writing this book. We hope you like it too. EU$ US$