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| HISTORICAL
INFORMATION ~ Scenes from the History of
Ultrasound ~ Page 3 |
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 1st Contact B-Scanner (1956) |
P3-SL10 |
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The first contact B
scanner was designed and built by Tom Brown on the
frame of a hospital bed-table. It is seen here with its first picture; this
shows
echoes from the skin, at the top of the picture, and from the bowel. |
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| Compound Sector Scanning |
P3-SL11 |
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The ‘bed table’
scanner, seen here in the Western Infirmary, Glasgow
was manually operated. A compound sector technique was used to
build up a two-dimensional image with grey scaling. |
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| Automatic Scanner (1959) |
P3-SL12 |
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Tom Brown developed the
world’s first and only fully automatic scanner in
order to give a consistent scanning pattern. Much of the early research was
carried out with this machine. |
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| The Early Experiments |
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| The early experiments led to the publication of
Donald, MacVicar and Brown’s first paper on diagnostic ultrasound in
The Lancet (1958). |
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| John MacVicar, Donald’s registrar (background),
and Ian Donald using the automatic scanner in the Western
Infirmary, Glasgow, c 1959. |
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| Serendipity |
P3-SL14 |
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The discovery that a full bladder gave a ‘sonic
window’ into the uterus was accidental. One of Donald’s patients with
a full bladder was scanned. A gestation sac was seen and ultrasound became a
valuable tool in obstetrics as well as gynaecology. This picture shows twin
gestation sacs (s) under the large dark area of the bladder (B). |
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