The patient, a man in his early twenties, hobbled into the E.R. on a Wednesday morning, anxious and gasping, his shirt covered in blood. Minneapolis in the nineteen-eighties was experiencing an increase in violent crime that would later earn it the nickname Murderapolis; at Hennepin County Medical Center, the city’s safety-net hospital, stabbings and gunshot wounds had become commonplace.
Ultrasound is an old technology, with roots in the sonar scanners used during the Second World War. For decades, it’s been used mainly to inspect fetuses while they’re still in the womb, and to examine diseased hearts. But, in the past few decades, rapid advances in computer technology, combined with the trial-and-error work of clinicians, have transformed ultrasound into a powerful diagnostic instrument for everything from damaged organs to tuberculosis.
The stethoscope, medicine’s most totemic object, had faced similar obstacles. In 1816, a physician named René Laennec was treating a young woman with cardiac disease; worried about the impropriety of putting his ear directly to her chest, he rolled a piece of paper into a tube, placing his ear at one end and his patient at the other. To his surprise, he found he could hear heart and lung sounds more clearly than with his ear alone.
Many early ultrasound boosters had envisioned this scenario. But experimenters in fields as diverse as ophthalmology, rheumatology, and orthopedics also seized on the technology, and they have pushed its boundaries far beyond the emergency setting.
The difference at the moment is cost. Also, it is quite hard to interpret. if you could get point of care, ultrasound to be relatively cheap, and have some sort of automated AI tool to assist, then yes.
tough break for halloween stores
Heard this back in 2021 from a Filipino FM resident in the US.
Low cost?! I call BS!
Low-cost to who? The last time I had a non-pregnancy ultrasound, even with insurance, it cost me $200
Not sure that is true
Ultrasound scanner, invented Glasgow, 1950s
pikaso_me screenshot this
Absolutely... article is 100%