A physiologist in the quiet blackness of the night observes how bats navigate in complete darkness.
A Physicist invents a transducer using sound waves to detect ice bergs after the sinking of the Titanic.
A neurologist uses it to detect brain tumours in Russia.
Students in the last bench of a Physics class stare dreamily at the professor talking about the properties of sound waves.
A Philanthropist donates a large sum of money to a Mission hospital.
A teenage girl feels a lump in her breast.
A company produces medical equipment in Japan.
An elderly gentleman visits the anaesthetist to get clearance for his cataract surgery.
A little baby with a very large head and recurrent episodes of vomiting gets admitted to the ICU.
A college going boy is brought to the emergency room with abdominal injury after ramming his car in a drunken haze.
A first time mother 24 weeks pregnant visits an obstetrician.
An unborn baby floats in her womb swallowing amniotic fluid and wiggling its tiny fingers.
An obstetrician palpates her abdomen and writes out an investigation to rule out anomalies.
A recent MBBS graduate starts her first day at a mission hospital.
A radiologist turns to his third ultrasound of the morning.
An ultrasound machine unites them all.
A world of greys and blacks and whites. Of shadows and densities. Of depth and gain. Of flow and colour. Of angles and pressure. A real time wonder of physics.
Its language is completely different, and to describe what one sees therein takes years of practise and reporting. That single transducer, as it makes contact with the abdomen, opens a portal to another world, the unseen, is demystified for us to see in plain sight. A little angulation of the probe, slight variation in pressure as you glide your probe across the slippery jelly, leads you through various cross sections and fleeting glimpses of human anatomy. You can pick up gallstones, ovarian cysts, free fluid in the abdomen, aqueduct stenosis, breast lumps, a calcified valve, and ejection fraction – just a few simple examples of its varied use in the medical field.
But as is the case with all good things, examples of its misuse are also very prevalent. It is shrouded in litigation over prenatal sex diagnosis, with sonologists levying large sums of money to dish out illegal sex determination, greeting the prospective parents with a ‘Jai Mata Di!’ if it’s a girl and a ‘Jai Shri Ram!’ if it’s a boy. I wonder, why that shifts the blame entirely on the sonologist for female foeticide, since the sex ratio in our country has been bad, even after - implementation of the PNDT act and even before – the advent of prenatal sex diagnosis.
In recent months I have seen many antenatal ultrasounds with developing foetuses at different gestations. It fills me with awe and wonder to see little fingers moving, a foetus swallowing amniotic fluid, the circle of willis twinkling colourfully in the Doppler, the four chambered heart thumping energetically, valves flapping open and shut in lively rhythm, the spine from cauda equina to the craniovertebral junction and the continuity of skin along it, developing eye balls, the infantile nasal bone, a little human taking shape and form so rapidly and with such organisation that it puzzles me how anyone thinks all this doesn’t have a creative maker behind it. I realise the great significance of a normal scan when we encounter a baby having anencephaly with everything else in perfect order, when a patient with bleeding per vaginum for the last week is told that she’s had an abortion, or when you don’t hear the foetal heart on auscultation and rush hurriedly to the USG room only to encounter intrauterine fetal demise - an ominously still heart.
The USG is an unsung hero, the little overlooked brother of the more glamourous and imposing CT, MRI (Not that they aren’t mighty useful and fascinating!), very modest and very helpful when in the right hands.
The oft heard dictum which stands true when peeping into the monitor of an ultrasound is this –
‘The eyes cannot see, what the mind does not know’.
A Physicist invents a transducer using sound waves to detect ice bergs after the sinking of the Titanic.
A neurologist uses it to detect brain tumours in Russia.
Students in the last bench of a Physics class stare dreamily at the professor talking about the properties of sound waves.
A Philanthropist donates a large sum of money to a Mission hospital.
A teenage girl feels a lump in her breast.
A company produces medical equipment in Japan.
An elderly gentleman visits the anaesthetist to get clearance for his cataract surgery.
A little baby with a very large head and recurrent episodes of vomiting gets admitted to the ICU.
A college going boy is brought to the emergency room with abdominal injury after ramming his car in a drunken haze.
A first time mother 24 weeks pregnant visits an obstetrician.
An unborn baby floats in her womb swallowing amniotic fluid and wiggling its tiny fingers.
An obstetrician palpates her abdomen and writes out an investigation to rule out anomalies.
A recent MBBS graduate starts her first day at a mission hospital.
A radiologist turns to his third ultrasound of the morning.
An ultrasound machine unites them all.
A world of greys and blacks and whites. Of shadows and densities. Of depth and gain. Of flow and colour. Of angles and pressure. A real time wonder of physics.
Its language is completely different, and to describe what one sees therein takes years of practise and reporting. That single transducer, as it makes contact with the abdomen, opens a portal to another world, the unseen, is demystified for us to see in plain sight. A little angulation of the probe, slight variation in pressure as you glide your probe across the slippery jelly, leads you through various cross sections and fleeting glimpses of human anatomy. You can pick up gallstones, ovarian cysts, free fluid in the abdomen, aqueduct stenosis, breast lumps, a calcified valve, and ejection fraction – just a few simple examples of its varied use in the medical field.
But as is the case with all good things, examples of its misuse are also very prevalent. It is shrouded in litigation over prenatal sex diagnosis, with sonologists levying large sums of money to dish out illegal sex determination, greeting the prospective parents with a ‘Jai Mata Di!’ if it’s a girl and a ‘Jai Shri Ram!’ if it’s a boy. I wonder, why that shifts the blame entirely on the sonologist for female foeticide, since the sex ratio in our country has been bad, even after - implementation of the PNDT act and even before – the advent of prenatal sex diagnosis.
In recent months I have seen many antenatal ultrasounds with developing foetuses at different gestations. It fills me with awe and wonder to see little fingers moving, a foetus swallowing amniotic fluid, the circle of willis twinkling colourfully in the Doppler, the four chambered heart thumping energetically, valves flapping open and shut in lively rhythm, the spine from cauda equina to the craniovertebral junction and the continuity of skin along it, developing eye balls, the infantile nasal bone, a little human taking shape and form so rapidly and with such organisation that it puzzles me how anyone thinks all this doesn’t have a creative maker behind it. I realise the great significance of a normal scan when we encounter a baby having anencephaly with everything else in perfect order, when a patient with bleeding per vaginum for the last week is told that she’s had an abortion, or when you don’t hear the foetal heart on auscultation and rush hurriedly to the USG room only to encounter intrauterine fetal demise - an ominously still heart.
The USG is an unsung hero, the little overlooked brother of the more glamourous and imposing CT, MRI (Not that they aren’t mighty useful and fascinating!), very modest and very helpful when in the right hands.
The oft heard dictum which stands true when peeping into the monitor of an ultrasound is this –
‘The eyes cannot see, what the mind does not know’.
Good one. In Jharkhand, it is 'jelebi taiyyar rakhna' if it is a boy and 'laddoo milenge' if it is a girl.
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