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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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History of Medical Ultrasound