Thanks to modern medicine, diagnosing illnesses and injuries are much easier than ever before. There are so many tools and techniques used today that virtually any medical issue can be pinpointed quickly. One of the most common diagnostic techniques used in medicine is sonography, also called ultrasonography or even ‘ultrasound‘. This completely painless, noninvasive procedure is used thousands of times each day around the world for a number of different things. From taking a look at unborn babies to diagnosing heart murmurs, it’s used in every branch of medicine. But while most people are somewhat aware of what an ultrasound does, few understand how it actually works.
At its most basic level, sonography is nothing more than the use of high frequency sound waves to create images of organs and other tissues. The science behind sonography isn’t too complex, and can actually be very interesting. The sound waves used in sonography are nothing more than clusters of molecules being pushed together. The sound waves pass through the molecules and cause them to vibrate. These vibrations can be transferred into images by using specialized equipment. The waves used in sonography are also very high frequency – operating at anywhere from one to fifteen million Hertz. The human ear can’t hear anything above twenty thousand Hertz.
When you have an ultrasound, the ultrasound technician will pass a device known as a transducer over the part of your body that needs to be scanned. In some cases you may need to have a probe inserted into the body, but this is normally only during specialized procedures. The transducer bounces the sound waves through your body and turns the resulting vibrations into images which are then displayed on a video screen. Those images are normally captured for a doctor to review later. The sonography technician doesn’t handle the diagnosis since they’re only qualified to operate the equipment and record the data.
The highest frequency settings of an ultrasound can show the actual muscle and tissues in a person’s body, while lower ones are used to look at unborn children and organs. Ultrasounds are so popular due not only to the quality of the images they produce, but also due to the fact that they remove the need for invasive procedures in most cases. Instead of having to perform exploratory surgery or use more expensive measures, an ultrasound can normally provide a doctor with enough information about any part of your body to determine if problems exist.
