Ultrasounds 101: What Every Patient Needs To Know

When most individuals think of ultrasounds, they remember it is a method for determining a baby's gender before it is born and they forget ultrasounds actually have many other applications in the medical field. These convenient machines are one of the simplest ways of viewing anything inside a patient's body, and as such, they are used for a wide range of diagnostic techniques. Here are a few things every patient needs to learn before they take an ultrasound.

What Is General Ultrasound Imaging?

At the most basic level, ultrasounds are an imaging tool. The answer to "what is general ultrasound imaging?" is essentially that an ultrasound is a type of scan that creates a picture of the body's interior. When we start looking at ultrasounds more closely, we see an ultrasound is somewhat unique among imaging tools. Instead of using potentially dangerous radiation, it uses basic sound waves. A sonographer operates an ultrasound imaging machine. Once the sonographer uses the ultrasound to create an image of the patient, a specialist may be needed to interpret the images, which tend to look like like a black and white picture with very fuzzy boundaries. In some cases, a doctor may inject a contrast dye to make the image clearer. However, the average ultrasound picture is just a rough outline of all the organs in the body.

Continue to learn more about precisely how ultrasounds work.

How Does It Work?

Ultrasounds work to produce images through sound waves. The machine sends sound waves through the body, and whenever the waves encounter something, a tiny portion of them bounce back. When an object is dense, such as a stone in a gallbladder, a higher amount of sound waves will bounce back. This bouncing back or echoing is the key to understanding how ultrasounds work. A machine interprets the sound echoes to get a picture of the various densities of the objects that the ultrasound waves encounter. The machine that turns the sound echoes into an image depicts all of these separate densities as shades of gray. Machines have the option of transmitting sound waves at various speeds. A higher speed or frequency of ultrasound wave provides better resolution, but it cannot penetrate as deep into the body.

Continue to learn about the different types of ultrasounds.