
The advancement of tools and refinement of procedures are happening everyday. Ultrasound technology and its application in healthcare have continued to mature. This is still very early in the history of diagnostic medical sonography, but it was clear that this noninvasive technology had tremendous possibility. He transmitted an ultrasound beam through the human skull in attempts of detecting brain tumors. It was in 1942 that Neurologist Karl Dussik is credited with being the first to use ultrasonic waves as a diagnostic tool. Medicine Benefits from Developments in UltrasoundĪs time passed, others continued to build on Spallanzani’s work.

The physiologist gained insight that the bats were relying on the sense of sound for navigation because when he placed closed brass tubes inside the mammals’ ears, they could not navigate the room properly and would fly into the wires.Īlthough he did not know that the bats were emitting their own sound for orientation, sound higher than he or any human would be able to hear, Spallanzani was able to conclude that the creatures were using their ears to navigate their environment. Spallanzani knew this because bells were attached to the ends of the wires. Neuweiler adds that the Italian scientist even blinded the bats by burning them with a “red-hot needle” and still they were able to avoid the wires. “When he repeated the same experiment using bats, these small mammals flew confidently around the bishop’s study, even in total darkness, managing to avoid the wires that Spallanzani had hung from the ceiling,” wrote Neuweiler. Gerald Neuweiler, in his book The Biology of Bats, describes how Spallanzani brought owls into his lab and observed that they would not fly around the room if there was no source of light. Echolocation pulses are short bursts of sound at frequencies that span from about 1,000 hertz in birds to at more than 200,000 hertz in whales. We can find several additional examples of echolocation in nature. Balint A brief history of musculoskeletal ultrasound: ‘From bats and ships to babies and hips’, Rheumatology, Volume 43, Issue 7, 1 July 2004. “The first detailed experiments that indicated that non-audible sound might exist were performed on bats by Lazzaro Spallanzani,” states D. Ultrasound is characterized as sound waves with a frequency higher than what is audible to the human ear. RELATED: 7 Female Pioneers in Medical Imaging These same principles are how medical ultrasound technology functions today. This is now known as echolocation where locations are determined or identified through sound waves being reflected or bounced back from objects in an environment. In 1794 Spallanzani performed studies on bats that concluded that they could navigate using sound rather than sight. Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729-1799) was a physiologist, professor and priest who carried out numerous experiments that led to great insights in human and animal biology.

Many ask, who invented the ultrasound? Italian biologist, Lazzaro Spallanzani is most often credited person for discovering ultrasonography.
