Word: ultrasounds
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Everybody knows that babies are good for business, but few know it quite as well as Tracie Pierce. She's director of operations at Fetal Fotos, a chain of studios headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, that sells to expectant mothers ultrasound portraits of their babies while they are still in the womb. The chain is the largest of perhaps two dozen similar businesses cropping up at strip malls and on street-corners around the country. They owe their popularity to improvements in the software used to create ultrasound images. Mothers willing to give $150 and 30 minutes of their...
...everybody's sighing. Dr. Lawrence Platt, an obstetrician in Los Angeles and former president of the American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine, finds the practice appalling. The ultrasound machine, which builds images by bouncing sound waves off the baby, is not known to be hazardous, but its sale or promotion is approved by the FDA only for medical purposes. It may turn out that there are ill effects associated with the procedure that haven't yet been discovered. "Using it for entertainment is an abuse of the technology," says Platt. Besides, he says, he's happy to give patients footage...
During a routine ultrasound en route to Martha’s Vineyard, the Fairchilds’ doctor discovered that Naia had a hole in her heart. The condition would require open heart surgery a month after her birth...
...some damage to the cardiac muscle. Hidden cases of heart disease can sometimes be spotted by performing an ECG while the subject is exercising on a treadmill--the so-called stress test. The greater the demand placed on the heart, the more likely a problem will turn up. Using ultrasound or radioactive dyes during a stress test may provide more clues--by showing how well the arteries are supplying blood to various parts of the heart. But here again, small blockages may not trigger any symptoms. Even the gold standard for detecting fatty deposits, an invasive procedure called angiography...
Some doctors are experimenting with ultrasound probes, which they thread through the arteries to try to locate this soft, vulnerable plaque. Others are looking at magnetic resonance imaging and other specialized scanning techniques that may highlight the presence of vulnerable plaque...