How Ultrasound Works

It's all just it's exactly what we hoped it would be. And we cannot wait for you to get your hands on it. Yes, we can't. Um and you don't have to wait. Actually, well you do have to wait, but you don't have to wait to order. You can go pre order the book right now everywhere you get books, and you will eventually get a special gift for pre ordering, which we're working on right now. That's right, So check it out soon coming this fall. Welcome to Stuff you

Should Know, a production of My Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles w. Chuck Bryan over there flying solo, batching it up. It's a stag party up in this piece, and this is stuff you should know. Remember the Happy Days where they had a stag party. Ritchie and Pozzy and Ralph Mouth went to a stag party with I think Richie's older brother who I believe his named Chuck. I think his name was Chuck, But I don't remember what happened.

I sort of remember that episode. I think they just got a little freaked out, a little titillated, aroused, and then freaked out. I think it sounds like what would have happened. Did Fonzie fix a juke box by hitting with this fist? I think that even may have been pre jukebox Fonzie. I don't even know that he was wearing a leather coat at the time. He may have just been wearing that weird gray jacket that he wore

at first. Yeah, like the mechanics jacket. And that would make sense because I think Chuck was only in the early days of the Happy Days, the happiest days, right. But then remember they like killed him off, like pretty graphically. He suffered from dysenterry for basically three straight episodes, and like that's all they focused on, and then he finally just died and they said, man, this is called happy Days. I think we need to just get rid of them. Yeah.

I think they changed their show runner after that. So, um, we're talking about ultrasound right now. And if you had Dysenterry, I'm not entirely convinced that ultrasound would help. But let's say you had it a kidney stone instead, Friend, ultrasound would help with that kind of thing. Yeah, they could. They could sniff out of kidney stone. Yeah they can. As a matter of fact. Well, what's funny is they do everything but sniff. They used to sound and they

used vision. I used the wrong. Uh, they don't sniffer take. Oh boy, that was great. Should be good. So, um, ultrasound. Everybody knows what ultrasound is. Just about everybody seeing an ultrasound picture. Um, you see little babies like in the womb developing and they're getting all cute and everything, or else you see them really early on and they're not at all cute. Um. But either way, I think everybody

is pretty familiar with ultrasound. UM, and I was too, but I still learned quite a bit from this incredibly outdated article by Craig freud and Rich PhD. Yeah, and you're speaking specifically of what's known as a sonogram. Uh. When a device that you know, we're going to talk about this in more detail, but a device called a transducer probe has either put on you or in you, depending on what depending on what they're after or how

close they need to get sure. Yeah. Absolutely, and then what well, I mean, you know, I can speak from experience. One of the best things in the world is when you see that first little picture of baby and heart beating. Uh. And then the worst moment is when you go in there and get one and that heart isn't beating. Yeah. And it's a un nerving moment when you go in there for that stuff. And like I said, it can be it can It feels both great and terrible and

I've I've experienced all. Yeah. But the thing is about ultrasound chuck um is most people think that it's that's what it used for us just check on babies, But it's used for a whole bunch of other stuff as well, which we'll talk about. And they're starting to find even more um cutting edge techniques for it too. So it's

actually pretty interesting stuff. And the whole thing magically is centered on crystals that are actually hidden in the incredibly greatly named transducer probe, and they actually, you know, in a way squeeze these crystals. And when you squeeze crystals, especially ones that have in irregular shape, they do something amazing. They produce energy vibrations in this case, and so by squeezing the crystal of of vibration of sound goes out

very high frequency sounds. Und it is it is ultrasound um on the order of something like this article says one to five mega hurts, but I saw two to twenty is much more standard, and it hurts. Is how many of the same part of a of a wavelength of you know, sound or something like that would pass

by a space a point in space every second. So in this case, say like the crest of these wavelengths, these ultrasound wavelengths um, the something like twenty million of their crests would pass by one point in space in one second, very very high frequency, very very tight um, which makes them very very energetic. So those are the vibrations the sound that is produced by squeezing crystals. And you would think just squeezing chrys souls is pretty pretty great.

Let's just give this thing a blue ribbon for being a wonderful piece of technology. But it gets even better than that. Yeah, I mean, if you're talking about the fact that there's a machine that then calculates these distances from the probe to whatever it's trying to measure and then basically can create a two and now even three

dimensional picture of that, it seems like magic. It does, especially because those those sound waves that propagate from the crystal being squeezed, which I like to think of is the crystals being squeezed, and it's making the sound and delight. It's not like a painful, painful sound that it's like, it's just like, yeah, it feels great. Um. So those sound waves, when they travel into the body, they hit

all sorts of stuff. They hit um, tissue, they hit um liquid, they hit everything and that's everything bone, yeah and um. The the higher frequency of a wave, the more likely it is to bounce back. So the a

lot of that stuff bounces back. And when it bounces back, chuck, it comes right back into those crystals, and when it hits those crystals, it actually produces electricity, and then that electrical impulse is what's converted into through some sort of black magic that I have a lot of trouble wrapping my head around into images. So sound gets translated into images via electrical impulses. And at the heart of it

all are those crystals. Yeah. I think if you were to ask your average person if an ultrasound like just a yes or no question, like an ultrasound does it use actual crystals to produce an image, you would probably get laughed out of the room by nine out of ten people and say, of course it doesn't. That's some sort of weird wiccan hoke um right, that you're trying to sell me on. It's it's not real, but it's remarkable.

I hadn't no idea that it uses crystals. Yeah. I think this machine is actually second only to um the breathalyzer machine in in surprising complexity man and I and I presume the ultrasaw machine was pretty complex. But yeah, I had no idea that they were squeezing crystals in there. Yeah. In nineteen forty two, there was a neurologist who used ultrasonic waves as a as a tool as a diagnostic tool for the first time named Karl with a Kadu sick and he was trying to search for brain tumors

through someone's skull. And I think it was not until the nineteen fifties, so about sixteen years later fifty eight that it was first used for a sonogram with Dr Ian Donald. Yeah. And the great advantage of ultrasound is that you're just you're sending sound waves, which are mechanical in nature into the body. UM. You're not using ionizing radiation like X rays, UM, So you're not going to like produce tumors necessarily, there's not You're just not exposed

to being exposed to radiation energy. You're being exposed to mechanical energy again, just acoustic waves of sound. But what's amazing about this is that that that sound, those echoes from that sound that bounce off of the different barriers or what they're called, say like between blood and tissue, a tissue and bone, as they bounce back up and they're converted into images you can see into the human body without using X rays and without cutting somebody open.

So it was an enormous advance that I think really gets overlooked, um at least by the general public, as far as medical advances go like, it was huge when

we figured out how to do this. Yeah, And that's why if you ever go to get a sonogram or something like this and they show you an image of your little bread love baking in the oven, and you catch yourself in your head thinking looks kind of crutty to me, just put your foot in the door and slam it real quick, and make sure you don't say that out loud in front of anyone in the room, because it is truly a little miracle machine just to get an image that looks that crutty, right, especially, don't

say it in front of Karl Dusick. No, it would really hurt this feeling. And all of this, I mean, this stuff is remarkable because it's the same concept of just the sonar that we use in the military and

the sonar that bats use. Yeah. And as a matter of fact, like our understanding of um echolocation, which is ultimately what it's based on, it's shooting out sound and then listening for the echoes and then taking the information that those echoes bring back to judge things like distance, shape, size, all the stuff. You can get a lot of information from sound if you know how to use echolocation. That's

what's happening. We're squeezing crystals to make this sound. And then in turn, after they shout, they turn into ears listening for the echoes that come back, and the echoes that come back ultimately become those white or bright or light areas on a sonogram. Um that that form like the shape, those are the echo. Yeah, and it's way better. The very first uh sonograms, they would get boxes of bats.

They would open the lid and throw it over the pregnant belly very fast, right, let them fly around for a couple of minutes, and then take those bats into another room and give them pads of paper and pencils, and said to draw what you heard. And bats are actually pretty good at drawing, most of them are. It's surprising, honestly that it looks about as good as the current sonogram. Yeah, so I guess you're not a big you're not super

impressed by the resolution. You know, it's fine, Like I said, when you when you realize what's going on, it's truly a miracle. And and the three D ones, yeah, I mean those are kind of creepily accurate, right they are. They have a little uncanny valley thing going on. But I'm not sure why, but they definitely do. But that's a huge advance in ultrasound because, like originally in ultrasound, especially if you just see the flat one that almost looks like a grainy X ray or something like that,

but you're seeing something like soft tissue. That's another advantage of ultrasound over X ray. X ray typically shows much harder stuff, whereas an ultrasound card. So you even like blood, something is as um non dense dense lists. Uh, what's the opposite of dense this guess loose Yeah, lucy, Even

as something is as anatomically lucy goosey as blood. Um, the ultrasound can capture that because of the high frequency and the other The other great thing about using high frequency is that or the other reason we use high frequency is the higher the frequency, the greater the resolution. And it's not a perfect analogy, but it's similar to how if you increase the magnet shoote of a microscope

you can see smaller and smaller stuff. It's very much similar to higher the frequency of say sound in an ultrasound machine, the more finely detailed, the more resolution you can have. The problem is is that the those higher energy um uh wavelengths tend to bounce back, tend to reflect very easily, lower energy travels further and further through

the body. So what they figured out is you can combine these and that's how you ultimately get three D imaging, which we'll talk a little more about in a minute. You want to take a break, Yeah, let's take a break and we'll come back and talk about all the parts of this. I was about to call it the wonder machine, but we already have one of those, the miracle machine. Miracle machines. Good, all right, right after this, alright, so the miracle machine has uh and you know, they

don't explain any of this stuff. They basically, you know, you go in there and they're just like, hey, this thing works. Uh, this is a bit of black magic. And just sit back and and open up and here comes the probe. Yeah, we um. I think we should go over the list that appears in this article that was apparently written by Franz Kafka. Yeah, all right, we have to, okay, agreed. I have a feeling you're talking about the final few things about what happens during an

ultrasound examination. Oh that part. Yeah, sure, okay, alright, so you got your transducer probe, which we already talked about a little bit, and that is the thing that the eyes and the ears that sends and receives those waves and like we said, it can go if you if you see this in a movie, then um, you're likely seeing the kind that they put on your belly because you're far along and they want to see like that little baby in the body parts and everything. Um that

is later on in a pregnancy. At first they use the one that goes uh you know, into the vagina with a condom strapped on the end of it, not strap but rolled down. Sure, I mean it makes perfect sense, you know, yeah, I mean you gotta put some sort of protective covering over it. And what better than a condom to fit over something that's sort of shaped like a penus. And then they lose that thing up and then up it goes. And then that's how you check

on things in the earlier parts of their pregnancy. I would hope that they would have these much smaller, is it? Well, I mean I don't they don't use a magna, they don't need use the magnum, right, but even still a condom fits very loosely too, I should Okay, okay, that's what I was after. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's Um, I'm trying to I'm looking around the room that you're not even in to try and compare it to something. But what does that mean? Well, I mean I'm in the

we're working from home. No, no, you said you were looking around the room, Yeah, trying to compare it to something, but I'm not there, correct, I'm looking for a like object in the room that you're not even sitting in. Yeah, I know, I got what you're saying. I was making a different choke that you're not picking I'm not picking up on it. Let's say it's as big as this,

uh highlighter's sort of like a sharpie magic marker. Okay, okay, roughly yeah, alright, So I think we're together on the side of the transducer probe that's used early on, that's inserted man, and they might use that same they might use that same one. What what were you going to say? How did we get through like breastfeeding and female puberty and this one is the one that's tripping us up? So I know I have no idea. Um, I'm going to get us back on track. They'll watch this all right,

that same uh wand wand great word for it. Um. It might be used anally orally all sorts of different ways. They might stick it in whatever orifice they can. It's not just vaginally, depending on what they want to get a closer look at is, you know, especially if they're not just looking at a baby. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, let's move on. Let's do all right. Up next on the list is the CPU. And that's you know, that's the little computer that does all that that black magic math.

Uh and it notes here in the article that contains the electrical power supply. I noticed that too. I thought that was really specific. Um. So yeah, like, if you look at any um, any ultrasound machine, even the most cutting edge ones that they have now look pretty much the same as one you would have seen in like the seventies, they're just a little slimmer. Um, they're a

little more user friendly. They'll probably have a touched green I saw that the I think it's the Siemens Sequoya has a gel warmer, which I'm sure is very appreciated by patients. But I mean, for the most part, it's it's just like everything that this article from I don't know, probably two thousand and eight, um yeah, is describing Yeah, you've got your transducer pulse controls, and that's where you can change the frequency, the duration of the pulses, the amplitude,

which we'll look. We'll explain what that means in a little while. To the to the tech, they might understand what's going on, but really it's them saying like, um, get clear focus, go deeper, three D mode, that kind of thing. But to the computer, it's like, no, we're we're messing with the amount of electricity that's coming and going through the crystals. Correct, Okay, all right. You got your display that speaks for itself, a little monitor, it

says on here keyboard right inputs data. Yeah. I thought that was pretty funny too. The next two are my favorites of this list, though, why don't you go ahead then take it away? I wasn't expecting that was taking a sip of coffee. You've got the disk storage device, which could be anything from a hard drive, floppy disk, or c D yes, and it says that it stores the acquired images. And I actually wrote, I wish you could see this. I wrote, ha ha under that part

that it clearly does not have a USB drive. No, clearly not or any kind of SSD driver or anything like that. But then the last one, Chuck, is the printer, which I'm sure still exists, but I'm just guessing that they were in describing a dot matrix printer in this one. No, the printers there, but it's but it's when you know, it's one of those little guys that you just put punch the button and it spits out and then they

tear it off. Yes, so I mean, you know they can email you a jpeg, I'm sure, but they're also like, here this goes on your fridge. Here's a butterfly made out of letters get home. Okay. So again that's still basically the components of ultra saw machine. And what I was like, surely, surely this article is just hopelessly out of date, and I mean it really isn't It doesn't. It didn't capture, you know, some of the cutting edge

stuff that's being used today. But really, ultra saw machines haven't changed that much in the last like ten twenty, maybe thirty or so years. They've just gotten smaller, more powerful and as um As like computer technology has improved, so too has whatever computer you're gonna find on board and ultraso machine. But the nuts and bolts of it are still generally the same thing and the um the

key though. The thing that's really changed over time and gotten better and more sophisticated and varied is that transducer probe. Because initially, yeah, for sure, if you're gonna make any improvements, you want to make it to the transducer because it's going to have some pretty big effects in the keyboard. Maybe maybe so because you do want to input data easily.

But with that transducer probe, initially they had to say like one crystal um and that crystal would shoot basically a static beam that was going out into your body and it would basically just take a snapshot of whatever it came in contact with. There might not have been much adjustment to resolution, to depth, to focus anything like that. It was just like, here, what do you expect. It's the nineteen fifties, Give me a break. You're looking into

a human body using sound waves. Just be impressed with that. But then as they started to figure out how to add more and more crystals, into um an array. Yeah. Uh, you can do all sorts of different things, and now all of a sudden, your output of sound waves can be adjusted crystal by crystal, and your input can be adjusted crystal by crystal as well. So the resolution overall is just magnificently improved since they started making a raise of crystals in these transducer probes. Yeah, and you did

a nice little quickie overview of how it worked. But I don't think we mentioned that it's based on a principle called the piezo electric or pressure electricity effect. Yeah, we didn't. Uh, and that's discovered by a couple of dudes in the eighteen eighties, Pierre and Jacques Curie. Any relation. I meant to look that up. Yeah. I think Pierre is Marie Curi's husband, one of the two are. I'm pretty sure it was Pierre. Yeah, and one of the

few times the wife has overshadowed the husband's accomplishments. Yes, but all three of them were extremely accomplished. Yeah. I don't want to knock the Curries. It's kind of tough too. They actually contributed quite a bit. Um, I mean, how much do you want to go over this again? How much more detail do we do we want to throw on people? I mean, I think we basically already explained it. We just left out that it's called the Piazza electric effect,

which the Cury's discovered. I mean yeah, but again, ultimately, you squeeze a crystal and then it makes a yelp, and then it listens out and that whatever bounces back gets converted into electricity. It's a it's a it's an inherent property of irregularly shaped crystals. That is just astounding that that actually happens, and maybe even more astounding that humans figured out how to harness it to look inside

the body. Yeah, and you know, they're the two most important parts are obviously that in the CPU and the CPU to be able to figure out and this of course just programmed to do so. It's not an emotional living thing that that yet had a fire under its butt, right, But the way that it figures out how to to basically plot these uh, I mean, it's kind of plotting densities is what it's doing at the end of the day,

don't you think. Yeah, for sure, based on the echoes that come back in the distance of them, and um, yeah, how how energetic the echo is because you know when a when a frequency of sound or a wavelength hits something UM and it's bounced back, it transfers some of its energy. I don't think it's I don't want to say this because we're going to get an email from

physics people, so let me just caveat it. With that, I would be very surprised if there's any situation or many situations, especially when you're talking about something is as cluji as the human body UM where you're going to get a dent reflection back, but based on the different kinds of intensities that are received back into that crystal, that those can be measured and you can map like, oh, this is actually a very solid part compared to this this part which now you can see as the edge

because it just kind of tapers off. Uh. And the wavelength didn't bounce back quite as strongly because some of it missed or some of it was absorbed. Yeah. And the cool thing about all of this is it's done in real time. It's not like they're doing this and then a couple of days later you get your photo. I mean, it's it's all right there. Uh. In the case of a Sonograham and I guess every every use of it, but that's the only one I've experienced personally.

It's right there on the monitor and um, you know you you hear the little heart beating too, so it actually um records sound as well. That's net and this article didn't really touch on that. UM. But I that's that's just astounding to me. It's like, um, that's the most like sonar I think, is that. UM. I mean, that's that's where some that's the same echo location is all the basis of this right where you're you're making

a sound and then listening back for an echo. But in this case, we we've figured out how to transfer those those sounds that are what comes back into images. But it would make sense that you could also just maintain it as a sound too, right, Yeah, I mean I would think so. I mean that's what a hydrophone is, that it was underwater mics that also just listened to, you know, sound. I'm a little stumped on that one, I have to admit. Or maybe there's a tiny microphone

attached maybe so be quiet the microphones list. Uh No, I think that's probably just a part of the programming and maybe perhaps that is the easiest part. Perhaps so, but I really feel like we should just come totally clean and say that it was all educated guests, which you can say is also just making up stuff on the spot. Yeah, yeah, someone someone can correct us and we'll read it out loud. Yeah, we'll read it out loud. We do that kind of thing. So, like we said,

we've been talking about the two D variety. UM, they they I guess this was around the mid to early two thousand's because they talk about sort of the new three D imaging UM and it's it's it's been around for a while now, right, it's basically the standards three D, although I think two D is still you know, very much in use to you think two D is the standard or maybe it has to do with how far along as far as sonograms go right, or really what they need to do, but the UM or how what

they need to see. I think it probably also depends on that as well. UM. But the so two D is that standard, the one that almost looks like an X ray. It's basically a snapshot. It's kind of grainy. Um, but that's that's what people think of as a standard.

Two D. UM sonogram or ultrasound picture. Then then you've got UM three D, which is that comes out as a result of the crystal arrays, right, So you can you can change the frequency of the pulses that are going out so you can sense things further away with the slightly lower frequency ones and sense things closer with the um the higher frequency ones. And the whole thing puts these images together to create a three D picture. Yeah. And like I said, if you've never seen a three

D picture, it ain't right from a sonogram. It's it's pretty interesting. It's remarkable that they can get this level of detail. Um. And part of it is surely to delight parents to be. Um, there's no doubt about it. But it's not just for that. It's not like, hey, you want to see an even cooler creepy picture of that developing circus peanut because we can we can do that now. Um. It has a lot of uses. You

can there's a lot more detail. You can really assess development of of limbs and the and the face of the of the baby to be, and you can really get in there and kind of see more with your eyeballs what's going on. Well. Plus also I mean, if you're looking for something like a tumor, it's much harder to see a tumor in two dimensions as like black and white shadows, then it is to see like a three dimensional lump. So that's super helpful for three D

as well. UM. And then there's there's another mode called M mode or motion mode, which I believe is basically a bunch of two D images that are just taken in such rapid succession that they are basically act like

a flip book or a video. So you can see this in in basically real time or just slightly delayed real time, because I know you kind of reference that this is all happening like immediately, but like the pulses that are being sent out and then returning are happening on the order of like millions of a second, over and over and over again. There's there's that kind of old timey single beam that's a constant wavelength UM that's

not much in use. The new ones are just very quick pulses that are shot out many many times in a single second UM. And as those things are shot out, the stuff is returning just mind bogglingly quickly to UM. The crystals to be turned into data. Now that's not the Doppler one, is it. No, the Doppler actually uses

a steady beam. From what I read, Yeah, so the Doppler ultrasound it's mainly used UM to to find out I mean, I'm sure they can use it for more than one thing, but it seems like the major uses to measure your blood flow rate UM and go to your heart. They can go to your major arteries and they can basically see if you've got any kind of blood flow problems because it's measuring a moving thing going through your body. Yeah, and it actually looks like a

weather map where they use Doppler radar. I mean most people see Doppler radar used for things like uh, um, tornado or something like that to show different wind speeds. So like the different flow speeds of the blood flow will be different colors and they can read that and be like, oh, you're your blood flowing nicely, right, you got no problems, right Doppler. So I feel like we should take another break. Huh. Oh my gosh, this is so thrilling that I think we need to to catch

our breath. All right, we'll talk about some of the other things. That you can do with a miracle machine. Right after this, you know, Chuck, it really gives me a tremendous amount of um comfort, hope, Uh, goodwill, m um, all sorts of stuff like that that we've come up in our twelfth year with another name for a machine, like we had Wonder Machine basically from the beginning. I think so and here we are in year twelve and we've just named another machine, that acal machine. So we've

talked enough. I think about well, we're gonna talk a little bit more about it, about obstetic obstetric man. I knew I was going to do that obstetrics. And when you go in there, like I said, part of it is to delight parents to be and say, here it is. Everything's going, heartbeat is strong, everything's happening. But they're also doing all sorts of things. They measure the size of the fetus. Um. They use a mouse to sort of

click around and measure different distances. Uh, they determine do date. Uh. They want to make sure that fetus is in the right position. Uh. They want to make sure the placenta is in the right position. They want to see how many fetuses there are in there. That's when you get the old By the way, I did not know if you knew this, but there are actually three living things inside of you right now or eight uh so growth rate. Um, you can detect the ectopic pregnant pregnancies this way. It's

a very big one. UM. That is when the baby is implanted in the flopian tubes instead of in the uterus, and that means it is not a viable pregnancy, right, so the life threatening for the mom. What else amniotic fluid. You gotta make sure that there's enough cushion around that baby. Yeah, for the pushing, well yeah, actually that's eventually yeah. Uh and then uh if you want to say, go in and take a sample of the amniotic fluid, which you can do a lot of things by um sampling amniotic

fluid to test um. So there's a lot of reasons to go in and draw some amniotic fluid. I don't know why I'm trying to convince everybody that that there's reasons to take samples of amniotic fluid. Just trust me, there is. But at the same time, you can sit there and look into the into the womb. The womb is okay, right, I'm not like using some archaic and now offensive term. Am I think? So? Okay, I don't think so either. If I am, please forgive me. I'm

genuinely unaware of that. So school me if I'm if I'm wrong, Like, oh, think so anyway, it's called a baby box these days, my friend? Right exactly? Yeah, Um, so if you want to keep an eye on the baby box while you're getting a sample of the amniotic fluid to make sure you're not accidentally poking the baby, that's the ultrasound is really effective for that. Man, Can

you believe they used to do that blindly? I was reading an article about using ultrasound to guide um spinal tap insertions, and this article said that that the authors believed that even though that you can use ultrasound for this, now that the technology is widely available, most neurosurgeons prefer to just go in blind because it's more thrilling. Seriously, this was an academic journal article that I was reading, and they just said it. So they crack open some

snippett and then go in there, Yeah, wearing a Hawaiian shirt. Uh, what else can you do? You can use the for cardiology, we talked about the blood flow but you can also literally say, hey, is there something going on inside of your heart, let's go look yep. Um, and especially with three D and real time stuff like you like, it's it's one thing to say, okay, well the shape of your heart looks pretty good, or the flow of your

blood looks pretty good. But thanks to that M mode, so you can see it in motion, you can actually see make sure that the valves are opening and closing correctly in the right the right time. Like it's basically just peeking in real time onto the operations of your of your body using M mode. It's pretty pretty amazing stuff. It's amazing. We also said, of course you can see kidney stones, which, by the way, I think we should do an episode on kidney stones eventually. Have you ever

had one? I don't want to say, because I don't want to jinx myself. Okay, so you haven't, but you fear it. Yes, that's it's a way to put it from. Yeah, I've never had a kidney stone either um or gall stones. I've never had any stones inside me. I've heard that getting those out is quite the ride. Yes, um, you can also measure blood flow through the kidneys to you can detect prostate cancer. You can see lumps on the prostate. UM, that's one of those instances where they will be using

the wand UM. Yeah. So I also said earlier on Chuck that, um, they're getting smaller and higher resolution and more portable and one of the places that ultrasound machines are showing to pop up more and more. And I think now it's probably just a matter of course based on how old this article is, but in emergency rooms they're starting to really become kind of par for the course.

So like if somebody shows up and says, like, you know, they're doubled over in abdominal pain, rather than sending them to surgery or um even up to radiology, they will they will just apply in ultrasound there and be like, oh, yeah, you've got to ruptured stomach, so we need to we need to get we need to get that. They say, Now I wish I would have rushed you into surgery. I need a second opinion. Uh yeah, ultrasounds are safe.

Um there. You know, there have been questions because anytime you're applying heat and energy near organs, like very close to organs, sometimes you've got to really kind of consider this, and there have been some reports here and there of low birth weight babies if you have had frequent ultrasounds during your pregnancy. But um, they have basically come out and say ultrasounds are safe. But sort of like an X ray, you don't want to come in here every other day and get one. You want to only do

it when when it's necessary because there is heat. Uh, and apparently the formation of bubbles because of this heat when dissolved gases come out of that solution. Um, you know that's a thing. But that they are safe, yeah, I mean, we've been using it for sixty seventy years now, and there's been plenty of chance for if that's an issue, for it to become obvious and evident with I mean, it's it just seems like it's very safe. I did

see that there. This article says that there's not been any documented studies that show harm in animals, and that's that's not true. Actually, there are animal studies that have shown that exposure to some kinds of ultrasound, typically continuous wave, which is just a concentrated beam of energy, that that can actually cause um thermal heating, which is not good. UM.

And then there. I found another study from two thousand seventeen that said some kinds, especially continuous wave, but also super um super quickly pulsed ultrasound has shown that it can break up DNA strands. Interesting, which is weird because like that's one of the things that people have always pointed to is well, this is just mechanical energy. It's not going to damage your DNA like ionizing radiation. Is

pretty it's a pretty startling revelation. And they actually said in the article, you know again, it was an academic journal article. I can't remember which one, UM, but it said like this is going to be of um like a lot of interest to a bunch of different fields because we didn't know this before. Yeah, that is interesting. Is it time to read the Franz Kafka Guide to

getting a ultrasound? Yes? I also want to say chuck before we do, though, um the there again, there's basically no evidence that there is harm that comes from ultrasound exams in obstet and obstetrics UM, especially when it's done by a trained person. Oh sure, Yeah, it doesn't sound like it's anything to be worried about. Overall, I didn't want to scare anybody unnecessarily. You shouldn't or people should not be alright, and you shouldn't both. Yeah, alright, So

Franz Kafkas guy to getting an a or sound. Number one. Man, if we could get Verner Hurtsog to read this list, that would just be amazing. We've got a pretty good uh runner up in the room. Nol does a great job. I should we should get Nolan here. We can double them in. Uh. Number one is to remove your clothes, okay. Number two is the ultra sonographer drapes the cloth over any exposed areas that are not needed for the exam. Right, okay, check number three. Uh, we should really get PAULA Thompkins

if we want to do this right. Actually, why what would he do? Well? He does a great Verner Hertzog. We should just get Verner hurt Zog. Yeah, man, he's down for whatever. It seems like? What stuff? Should I know? Uh? The ultrasonographer applies a mineral oil based jelly to your skin, doesn't say this or to the condom on the robe. The jelly eliminates air between the probe and your skin to help pass the sound waves into your body. Yeah, and if You're lucky. They're using a Siemens Sequoia brand

ultrasound machine, which has an onboard gel heater. That's right. Are they giving you money? No, okay, I want some of that Semens money. Hey man, they got there loaded. They're one of those companies that kind of make everything right. Yeah. Yeah. What if they did hear this and reached out to us and we're like, hey, we really appreciate it. We're sending you guys each an ultrasound machine. Hey man, I got it, can go with my I've got a Siemens brand.

Uh car charger, electric car charger, you go. I'll bet that's something that was left off this list. You can charge a car with a decent ultrasound or at the very least jump one off. It's it's got jumper. Uh. The ultrasonographer covers the probe with a plastic cover. That's the condom. Uh he slash she and I'm gonna add slash day pass the probe over your skin to obtain the required images. Depending on the type of exam, the

probe maybe inserted into you. You want to finish up here with the last few Oh no, you're doing great, all right? Number six. You may be asked to change position, change positions to get a better looks at the area of interest. Okay, here here, here's two thousand and eight popping up again. Number seven. After the images have been acquired and measurements taken, the data is stored on a disk.

You may get a hard copy of the images. They may write and sharpie what it is on the disk even and then yeah, this is where it starts to take a kind of a dark turn. Number eight you're given a towelet to clean up. And number nine, I can't believe he's actually on the list. You get dressed. It's just like the grimmest list of procedures you've ever heard of. And they stop at nine. Number ten should have been. Then you go give them your credit card and pay your co pay. Number eleven. You walk out

to the parking to the parking lot. Number twelve, walk back in because you forgot to get validated. Number thirteen. Check your back seat and make sure there are no creeps there, right. Number fourteen removed the creep that you found. Wow, the last so um, we're talking about the future of ultrasound and this this, uh, this article isn't really captured. So I started to look around. I found, weirdly enough, a list of cutting edge ultrasound stuff on the in

the Daily Mail of all places and UM. The list is actually terrible because it was Daily Mail article. But one thing that they did talk about was tractor beams that they figured out that you can actually lift UM something as small as a beat. At this point using sound waves. You would think kind of like Star Wars, but no, not at all. It's actually levitating more than a tractor beam. Actor beam makes it sound like you're pulling something upward towards you. This is actually raising it

up away from you. But there are all sorts of applications for this, especially in water, because you can use these sounds in the different arrays UM and the different configurations of a race to move something left or right. It's called steering the beam, and they actually use it for UM for ultrasound imaging too. But you can actually move things like say an oil slick. You could kind of basically drive it into shore, away from shore to some other place where you want to capture. Actually pretty

cool applications for it. UM. In medicine, they've figured out that if you give somebody a drug, say, like a chemotherapy drug. Um, some of those chemotherapy drugs only partially cross the blood brain barrier, so they're only partially effective. The rest just gets metabolized and and you pee it

out or whatever. So they figured out that if you give somebody a chemotherapy drug and then blast their brain with an ultrasound machine, seen, it will push the drugs past the blood brain barrier into your brain and they'll they'll be that much more effective. I thought that was pretty cool too. There was a man who was um awakened from a coma because the doctor, for some reason blast is hypothalamus with a continuous wave beam of ultrasound.

But even the doctor was like, this may have been coincidence, but you know, I don't know, man. It seems like they're all sorts of applications that are just starting to tap into. Yeah, I've got a couple more. Let's hear them. Ultrasound assisted lipa suction basically burning up fat cells. Yes, but that really kind of points out that, yeah, this actually can create heat, because that's what they're doing is

melting fat cells using sound, which is the thing. But then they've also figured out that depending on the frequency of the sound um of the sound wave. It can actually stimulate grow can function in cells. So they found that like persistent wounds like ulcers and things like that, you can actually stimulate them to heal by hitting them with sound waves. Yeah, I love it. Is there anything an ultrasound machine can't do, Chuck, I don't know. I do know, and I'll tell you what the answer that is.

And it's no. You got anything else? I got nothing else but a listener mail. Okay, Well that's it for ultrasounds forty seven minutes. That's impressive. Uh. Since I said it's impressive, it's time for listener mail. Hi guys, I am an eleven year old boy from the West Coast. My parents introduced me to your podcast a few years ago, and I became interested in podcast and podcasting because of you. I've recently started my own podcast called A Child's Perspective

of Current Events Nights. It sounds wonderful, it does. I'm gonna check it out. I haven't had a chance to listen yet, Dagan, but you said I would love it if you had mentioned my podcast during your listener mail section. It would really help boost my audience. H Slash monthly listeners. Thank you for your time. I really hope you will consider mentioning me on your podcast. And that is from Dagon Hofeld and again it's called A Child's Perspective of

Current Events. I love that straightforward name. It's like stuff you should know. It says it all. It definitely is in the same wheelhouse for sure. Yeah, but it's not derivative in any way. No, no, no, not like it. It's it's just in it's perfect simplicity. Yeah, I love it, and I'm gonna give that a listen this afternoon, Dagan and see how you're doing. And if you need any

other advice just let us know. But so far, the you've done the smartest thing, which was to get someone on a super popular podcast to talk about your podcast. That stuff one it helps. Hopefully you'll get an s y s K bump out of this. And I'm gonna go listen to Dagan. So thanks for letting us now, right, yeah, right, If you want to go check out Dagan's podcast, go do that. It's called A child Perspective on Current Events.

It's so great. And in the meantime, if you want to get in touch with this, you can send us an email like Dagan did, wrap it up spanking on the bottom, and send it off to Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radios. How stuff works for more podcasts for my heart radio because at the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.