The field of medicine utilizes a wide range of different procedures to help diagnose illness or injury, check for proper development or progress, and much more. Of all of these, sonography is the most commonly used one. An ultrasound may be used by doctors in virtually every field of medicine since it is so versatile. Becoming an ultrasound technician will allow you to earn a higher than average salary, great benefits like health insurance, and give you a sense of accomplishment on a daily basis. But you may be wondering just how an ultrasound actually works. While sonography schools will cover it in depth, getting a general understanding of it isn’t as difficult as you may think.
Sound Waves
An ultrasound machine contains a number of different components, most notably the CPU, the monitor, and the transducer. The transducer is the part of the machine that is placed on the body of the patient. Using piezoelectric crystals, it generates a burst of high frequency sound waves which pass through the body. Whenever they reach a density change – basically the boundary where two tissues or substance meet – a portion of the sound waves are bounced back to the transducer which detects them and sends them to the central processing unit.
Creating the Image
Once the CPU receives the sound waves it will turn them into a 2D image. It does this by looking at two basic attributes.
- How long it took the sound waves to return to the transducer after the sound wave was created.
- The strength of the echo that is received.
Since different tissues reflect sound differently, the different organs, muscles, tissues, bones, fluids, and gasses within the body will all have a different echo. The CPU analyzes the echoes and uses them to create the image on the screen. New technology can use a large number of 2D images to actually build a 3D image of the scanned object.
Reviewing and Capturing
The images will be displayed on the monitor, where the ultrasound technician will watch for the images that they need. They’ll be looking for a number of things depending on the nature of your ultrasound. Once they spot what they’re looking for they will capture the image and save it to the hard drive. When enough images are collected, the ultrasound will be over. The ultrasound technician will make any needed notes and deliver the ultrasound images to your physician for review and diagnosis.
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