For millennia, the only avenue a doctor had to look inside the
body was to cut a patient open. Then, on November 8, 1895,
Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen noticed an image cast from his cathode
ray generator. A week later, Rontgen took a photograph of his
wife’s hand, which showed her wedding ring and her bones.
Rontgen named this new form of radiation, X-radiation (X
standing for Unknown.) This was the beginning of x-rays and
radiology. Since that time, numerous forms of medical imagery
have evolved and advanced from film images to thousands of
digital files. In fact, with the sheer amount of medical imaging
data now available, it would be a catastrophic problem if a very
plausible disaster scenario wiped out even a small percentage of
this information. Lessons from Katrina “In a disaster recovery
setting, the ideal situation is to have electronic records that
can follow the patients,” said Robert Lynch, M.D., president and
CEO of Tulane Medical Center. “Several New Orleans hospitals
lost almost their entire medical r