Is cat scan an acronym

CAT scan used to be short for Computerized Axial Tomography. Think of this as using computers to map the body in the axial plane. (axial is a direction that the image is processed in).

The newer machines not only do axial but also multiple other imaging planes (coronal,sagital,biplane,multi plane,etc.) So now they dropped the "axial" and just call it CT scan short for Computerized Tomography.