History Page: Leaders in MSK Radiology.

Born in 1869, Gaston Contremoulins began his career as a painter. Fascinated by photography and discovery of X-rays by Roentgen in 1895, our ingenious self taught engineer joined the laboratory of microphotography in the faculty of medicine in Paris. He published in 1896 studies in the use of X-rays associated with a compass for research and anatomical localization of foreign bodies in the skull.

The first formulation of image-based stereotactic principles: the forgotten work of Gaston Contremoulins.

Although image-based human stereotaxis began with Spiegel and Wycis in 1947, the major principles of radiographic stereotaxis were formulated 50 years earlier by the French scientific photographer Gaston Contremoulins. In 1897, frustrated by the high morbidity of bullet extraction from the brain, the Parisian surgeon Charles Rémy asked Contremoulins to devise a method for bullet localization using the then new technology of x-rays. In doing so, Contremoulins conceived of many of the modern principles of stereotaxis, including the use of a reference frame, radiopaque fiducials for registration, images to locate the target in relation to the frame, phantom devices to locate the target in relation to the fiducial marks, and the use of an adjustable pointer to guide the surgical approach.