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 History of Medical Ultrasound |
The use of ultrasound in medicine began during and shortly after the
2nd World War in various centres around the world. The work of Dr.Karl Theodore
Dussik in Austria in 1942 on transmission ultrasound investigation of the brain
provides the first published work on medical ultrasonics.
Although other workers in the USA, Japan and Europe have also been cited as
pioneers, the work of
Professor Ian Donald and his colleagues in Glasgow, in the
mid 1950s, did much to facilitate the development of practical technology and
applications.This lead to the wider use of ultrasound in medical practice in
the subsequent decades. |
Early Scan |
From the mid sixties
onwards , the advent of commercially available systems allowed the wider
dissemination of the art. Rapid technological advances in electronics and
piezoelectric materials provided further improvements from bistable to
greyscale images and from still images to real-time moving images. The
technical advances at this time led to a rapid growth in the applications to
which ultrasound could be put. The development of Doppler ultrasound had been
progressing alongside the imaging technology but the fusing of the two
technologies in Duplex scanning and the subsequent development of colour
Doppler imaging provided even more scope for investigating the circulation and
blood supply to organs, tumours etc. The advent of the microchip in the
seventies and subsequent exponential increases in processing power have allowed
faster and more powerful systems incorporating digital beamforming, more
enhancement of the signal and new ways of interpreting and displaying data ,
such as power Doppler and 3d imaging.
For those requiring a more detailed history and references, an
excellent article on the
history of
ultrasound in medicine is published by Dr.Joseph Woo. |
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HISTORY OF ULTRASOUND |
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