[Ziedses des Plantes: inventor of planigraphy and subtraction]

Bernard George Ziedses des Plantes (1902-1993) trained in Utrecht, the Netherlands, as specialist in nervous diseases, but his lifelong passion was to improve X-ray imaging of living tissues. In the 1930s he not only built the first machine for planigraphy, in which the X-ray tube and the film moved together around the plane of interest, but he also designed the subtraction method to improve images after injection of contrast agents. Eventually a full-time radiologist, he also developed the 'somersault' technique of ventriculography and pioneered isotope scintigraphy.