Obituary of Robert Ledley (1926-2012)

Robert Ledley, Professor of Physiology and Biophysics and Professor of Radiology at Georgetown University School of Medicine and founder of the National Biomedical Research Foundation (NBRF), died of Alzheimer’s disease in Kensington, MD, USA on July 24, 2012. Ledley earned a DDS from NYU in 1948 and an MS in Physics from Columbia University in 1950.

He served in the US Army Dental Corps from 1950-1952, then worked at the National Bureau of Standards, Johns Hopkins University and George Washington University before joining the National Academy of Sciences - National Research Council in 1957.

In 1960, he chartered the National Biomedical Research Foundation to encourage the use of computers in biomedical research and development. In 1970, the NBRF partnered with Georgetown University Medical Center and Ledley joined the faculty there.

Ledley was key in the development of the Film Input to Digital Automatic Computer (FIDAC) which was used to digitize and analyze medical photographs, ranging from Pap smears to chromosome abnormalities. He also founded the peer-review journal Pattern Recognition, for which he remained the editor until 2010.

Beginning in 1973, Ledley led the development of the Automatic Computerized Transverse Axial (ACTA) scanner, an early whole-body computerized tomography (CT) scanner, for which he was awarded a patent in 1975. The ACTA prototype was later displayed by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, and for his role in its development, Ledley was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1990 and was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 1997.

Ledley was also involved in other significant developments in bioinformatics and computer development, and founded three other peer-reviewed journals — Computers in Biology and Medicine, Computer Languages, Systems and Structures, and what is now Computerized Medical Imaging and Graphics.

Ledley married Terry Wachtell in 1949 and they had two sons, Fred (born 1954), who is Professor of National and Applied Sciences at Bentley University, and Gary (born 1957), a cardiologist associated with Drexel University.