History of the sonogram and failure

Didn't read it, But today's sonograms are much better than the picture shown there... 3-D type images.. amazing. (We have young women in our office which how I've seen the newer sonograms.)

George H.

You keep reading that stuff and you'll be the smartestest person in the whole wide world...

Yep. I've seen my great-grandson to be (next month :-)

(I did a lot of chip design for ultrasound back in the '70's and '80's) ...Jim Thompson

I met Ian Donald a couple of time at EMI Central Research when he came around to look at EMI's phased-array ultrasound machine, when I worked on it there from 1976 to 1979.

By that time Ian Donald was lot older and a lot more famous - he was the then Pope's advisor on reproductive health, amongst other stuff.

The thing that sticks in my mind was that you could hear his artificial heart valves - he had two, both metal, and they clicked audibly, on every heart beat.

He was very enthusiastic about our real-time ultrasound machine.

We had a video of a feotus sucking it's thumb in utero, and his comment was that you didn't need the eye of faith to recognise what was going on.

In the late 1970's 3-D ultrasound imaging was very popular at conferences. The one common feature of the presentation was the people making the presen tation weren't much good. The ultra-sound images of the period were grainy and low-resolution. Combining two of them taken from slightly different ang les didn't really provide the kind of information that you needed to extrac t depth information - which was much more easily available from a second im age taken at a distinctly different angle, even if you couldn't fuse the tw o images to extract it.

When my kidneys were scanned last week, it was at 5.1MHz, offering more tha n twice the resolution available from our 2MHz standard heads back in 1976. Back then we did have a 4MHz scanning head, but the range in the body wasn 't great.

So...he is literally a chip off the old block.