Added: 11/23/2006 |
The Rapid Changes in Diagnostic UltrasonographyThe following article touches on the most positive aspect of diagnostic ultrasonography. It is the production of "pictures" of a growing fetus. Parents normally treasure such pictures. Sometimes, however, such a picture can show that a baby has a birth defect. Further medical advances, such as those that led to the development of sonography, are often needed to treat such birth defects.
Both couples lived in Los Angeles County. Both couples were about to become parents for the first time. Both couples even had the same last name. Yet those two couples did not obtain the same sort of report upon the release of hospital records, records related to the findings of a diagnostic ultrasonography procedure.
Now the above statement should not be seen as an inference that one developing baby had a birth defect. Although such defects can sometimes be found through the use of diagnostic ultrasonography, that was not the cause for the different sorts of reports. The difference in the reported information arose instead from the introduction of important new diagnostic abilities.
Those new diagnostic abilities greatly expanded the information that future parents could get following a diagnostic ultrasonography procedure. In 1982, for example, a couple could not count on a picture from a sonogram to show the sex of the baby until 3 to 4 weeks before the due date. Thus one of the two L.A. couples mentioned above did not learn the sex of their child until shortly before that child was born.
That first baby was a boy. The news that he would have a brother did not come from information obtained through diagnostic ultrasonography. It came from the analysis of the mother’s amniotic fluid. That baby brother has now become an adult. In fact, he has become a new father.
Now the early information that one of L.A.’s newer parents had obtained through ultrasongraphy was much more detailed than the information given to his parents. That couple learned that their new child would be a girl, when the mother was only about 4 months pregnant. They soon shared that knowledge with the baby’s uncle.
The uncle works in field that is important for both diagnostic ultrasonography and Doppler ultrasonography. He is a computer technician. The reports compiled from the information seen on a sonogram are made possible by the available computer programs. Such programs allow machines to take the echoes detected by the sonography equipment, and to transform that information into an image.
While the computer technician and the younger couple mentioned above should not need to use Doppler ultrasonography for some time, their parents might make use of its capabilities. Such equipment allows physicians to detect the speed with which blood is flowing in a patient’s veins and arteries.
One can thus see how ultrasonography offers benefits to people of all ages. It gives parents their first “picture” of their baby. It gives older patients important information about how efficiently their blood is being handled by their aging circulatory system.
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