<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>Imagine walking into your doctor's office for your diagnostic ultrasound for ovarian screening, rounding the corner to the procedure room, and then taking off your clothes and submerging yourself up to your neck in a horse trough full of water. That's how some of the earliest doctors across the world envisioned using ultrasound to image the human body between the 1940s and 1960s. Ultrasound technology was first used by the U.S. military to determine tiny cracks in the hulls of metal ships, not to see into living human bodies. So in 1949 when British doctor John J. Wild had the idea that ultrasound could be used to detect small human tissue irregularities such as cancer, his first goal was simple: how do we get out of the trough?</p><p><img alt="A man is submerged up to his neck in a metal bath that seems to be of some height. Metal rods protrude into the water and he rests his head against some sort of metal headrest." class="auto-caption media-image img__fid__19776 img__view_mode__media_large attr__format__media_large" rel="lightbox" src="https://americanhistory.si.edu/sites/default/files/styles/blog_image/public/Image%201%20-%20Cushman%20in%20Water%20Bath.jpg?itok=JRH_DXWC" style="width: 550px; height: 409px;" title="In the 1950s Douglass Howry's team was focused on "mapping" the human body using ultrasound. The bath was successful, but not very practical. This is C. R. Cushman, an electric engineer on the project. Image from "Medical Diagnostic Ultrasound: A Retrospective on Its 40th Anniversary" published in 1988 by Kodak Eastman with the National Museum of American History." /></p><p>While some scientists in the 1950s and 1960s were working on ultrasound in pregnancy, John Wild had a different goal: detecting cancer early. Wild spent most of the 1950s designing instruments small enough to screen common cancer sites, convinced that ultrasound could reveal the tiniest abnormalities in human tissue. It turns out, he was right, and we can thank him and his contemporaries for the wide use of ultrasound today.</p><p><img alt="A man lies facedown with a contraption on his back. It is made of metal with rubber tubing and is pressed against his back. He is shirtless but wearing pants with a belt." class="auto-caption media-image img__fid__19777 img__view_mode__media_large attr__format__media_large" rel="lightbox" src="https://americanhistory.si.edu/sites/default/files/styles/blog_image/public/Image%202%20-%20John%20Wild%20laying%20over%20Breast%20Scanner.jpg?itok=HtH6fcYr" style="width: 550px; height: 397px;" title="In this image, John Wild leans over a water bath and submerges his chest in water, testing how he imagined women could be screened for breast tumors before he developed a handheld instrument." /></p><p>But before ultrasound technology took off in medicine, scientists who suspected that ultrasound could help them "see" inside a patient had to rely on old military equipment like radar baths and discarded navy radar transducers. Once they proved that imaging human tissue was possible using these machines, they set off to make their own instruments specific to the world of medicine. Ultrasound machines have changed dramatically since then but every machine still needs one thing: a transducer. The transducer creates the sound waves that are sent into the body and then it receives the echoes sent back. These echoes are received by the machine and translated into the tiny blips of light we see on the screen. So where did the horse trough come in? Sound waves move through water faster than through air and are not dispersed as much. (Today we use a water-based gel—fewer spills that way!)</p><p><img alt="A piece of wood with cogs, a metal box, and other metal bits secured on it with screws. Some tubes are coming out of it and are attached to a metal object that looks like a hollowed-out can." class="auto-caption media-image img__fid__19778 img__view_mode__media_large attr__format__media_large" rel="lightbox" src="https://americanhistory.si.edu/sites/default/files/styles/blog_image/public/Image%203%20-Transducer%20in%20a%20can.jpg?itok=WjRWGkIU" style="width: 413px; height: 550px;" title="John Wild developed this prototype ultrasound machine (he called it an echo-graph) with a young engineer, John Reid. Here we see the Transducer-In-A-Can on the lower half of the picture." /></p><p>John Wild had the idea to combine the transducer and water together in a handheld device to both remove the patient from a neck-deep bath and better direct the sound waves to a specific location on the body. The result? The Transducer-In-A-Can. Wild's colleagues were worried that the concentration of sound waves and direct contact with the skin would harm a patient. Wild dispelled the myth by testing it on his own arm.</p><p><img alt="Two drawings side by side showing horizontal lines making up graphs and streaks and splotches of black ink going across the pages. There are two graph readings on each of the pages. There is an "A" and "B" on all of the graphs, the A's for the top one and the B's for the bottom ones." class="auto-caption media-image img__fid__19780 img__view_mode__media_large attr__format__media_large" rel="lightbox" src="https://americanhistory.si.edu/sites/default/files/styles/blog_image/public/Imgs%204%20and%205.jpg?itok=Jr6Rx9h3" style="width: 550px; height: 270px;" title="Can you read these? Probably not! The earliest ultrasound "images" were really just one-dimensional measurements of time and amplitude, or A-mode, forming a wave on the screen (left). (Image credit: Wild and Reid, "American Journal of Pathology" Vol. 285, 1952.) Only later in the 1950s were two-dimensional images, or B-Mode, developed (right)—still a far cry from the images we know today! (Image credit: "Further Pilot Echographic Studies on the Histologic Structure of Tumors of the Living Intact Human Breast.")" /></p><p>The aptly named Transducer-In-A-Can was just the beginning for ultrasound technology, but we can thank Wild and other early ultrasound scientists for bringing us out of the horse trough and into the world of portable, handheld ultrasound devices. It took until the 1970s for ultrasound, most known for giving expecting parents the first glimpse of their newest family member, to become a regular part of a patient's procedures. It took decades of using discarded equipment, innovation, and creativity to figure out how to turn sound into images, without the free bath.</p><p><img alt="A box labeled as a "cartridge" on the front for an ultrasonic transducer. There is other identifying text on the tan surface with a black border, as well as a metal cup-like object sitting in front with a hole and an opaque amber bottom" class="auto-caption media-image img__fid__19781 img__view_mode__media_large attr__format__media_large" rel="lightbox" src="https://americanhistory.si.edu/sites/default/files/styles/blog_image/public/Image%206%20-%20Ultrasonic%20Transducer.jpg?itok=ITv1CnZw" style="width: 550px; height: 413px;" title="Although the machines look different, the basic physics behind an ultrasound have remained the same since the 1940s. A piezoelectric crystal (above) is where the magic happens in the machine. The crystal is a type of transducer, which means an electric signal can cause the crystal to vibrate and produce that electric energy as mechanical energy. In this case, that mechanical energy is sound. The sound waves travel into the body and come back as an echo once they've hit different depths of tissue. The crystal receives that echo as a sound wave and converts it back to an electric signal. This signal is picked up, amplified, and displayed as data on a screen in the form of blips of light, distinguishable only to skilled ultrasound technicians!" /></p><p><em>Lauren Rever completed a curatorial internship in the Division of Medicine and Science, working under curator Judy Chelnick</em></p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-authors field-type-text field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Author(s): </div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">intern Lauren Rever</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-posted-date field-type-datetime field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Posted Date: </div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">Friday, March 10, 2017 - 07:00</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-blog-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above clearfix"><h3 class="field-label">Categories: </h3><ul class="links"><li class="taxonomy-term-reference-0"><a href="/blog-tags/medicine-science">Medicine & Science</a></li></ul></div><div class="feedflare"> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/OSayCanYouSee?a=DipmgfFfPPA:CDcMK6NLdQw:qj6IDK7rITs"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/OSayCanYouSee?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/OSayCanYouSee?a=DipmgfFfPPA:CDcMK6NLdQw:7Q72WNTAKBA"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/OSayCanYouSee?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/OSayCanYouSee?a=DipmgfFfPPA:CDcMK6NLdQw:V_sGLiPBpWU"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/OSayCanYouSee?i=DipmgfFfPPA:CDcMK6NLdQw:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/OSayCanYouSee?a=DipmgfFfPPA:CDcMK6NLdQw:gIN9vFwOqvQ"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/OSayCanYouSee?i=DipmgfFfPPA:CDcMK6NLdQw:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/OSayCanYouSee?a=DipmgfFfPPA:CDcMK6NLdQw:yIl2AUoC8zA"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/OSayCanYouSee?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"></img></a> </div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/OSayCanYouSee/~4/DipmgfFfPPA" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>
