Peter Wells (medical physicist)
British medical physicist (1936–2017)
Peter Neil Temple Wells (19 May 1936 in Bristol, England – 22 April 2017) was a British medical physicist who played a major role in the application of ultrasound technology in medicine.
Education
Wells was educated at Birmingham College of Advanced Technology and the University of Bristol where he was awarded his PhD in 1966.
Career and research
Wells made a number of notable contributions to the application of engineering and physics in medicine – he was the originator and developer of instruments for ultrasonic surgery and ultrasonic power measurement, as well as the two-dimensional, articulated-arm ultrasonic general purpose scanner and the water-immersion ultrasonic breast scanner.
He demonstrated ultrasonic-pulsed Doppler range gating, and was the discoverer of the ultrasonic Doppler signal characteristic of malignant tumour neovascularisation. He investigated ultrasonic bioeffects and formulated ultrasonic safety guidelines and conditions for prudent use of ultrasonic diagnosis.
Wells led multidisciplinary studies of ultrasonic diagnosis and made major contributions to the advancement of light transmission, electrical impedance and nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, as well as to interventional telepresence. He also proposed a novel philosophy of medical imaging. In the early part of the 21st century, he was developing ultrasonic Doppler and phase-insensitive tomography.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7176036. VIAF identifies the subject as 266603945. The Library of Congress control number is n50002459. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1936, 2017 and 1966.
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This entry incorporates text from “Peter Wells (medical physicist)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.