The Echocardiogram

I had a Fetal Echocardiogram yesterday. It is really an in-depth ultrasound of the baby's heart. The Doctor was explaining how if my diabetes is not controlled, it can cause congenital heart defects in the baby. It can also cause a hardening of the heart tissue. They were checking to make sure none of those things were happening to the baby. The tech recorded snippets of the heart beats and Doppler of the blood.

"Medical imaging

An echocardiogram can within certain limits produce accurate assessment of the direction of blood flow and the velocity of blood and cardiac tissue at any arbitrary point using the doppler effect. One of the limitations is that the ultrasound beam should be as parallel to the blood flow as possible. Velocity measurements allows assessment of cardiac valve areas and function, any abnormal communications between the left and right side of the heart, any leaking of blood through the valves (valvular regurgitation), and calculation of the cardiac output.

However, "Doppler" has become synonymous with "velocity measurement" in medical imaging. But in many cases it is not the frequency shift (Doppler shift) of the received signal that is measured, but the phase shift (when the received signal arrives).

Velocity measurements of blood flow is also used in other fields of medical ultrasonography, such as obstetric ultrasonography and neurology...

...If the moving source is emitting waves with an actual frequency f0, then an observer stationary relative to the medium detects waves with a frequency f given by:

where v is the speed of the waves in the medium and vs, r is the speed of the source with respect to the medium (positive if moving towards the observer, negative if moving away) radial to the observer." - From Wikipedia

But that wasn't the coolest thing! The coolest thing was seeing the baby move around. Apparently fetuses (fetusii?) detect the ultrasound frequencies and it BOTHERS them, poor things. The tech said that sometimes it takes a long time to finish the study if you get a "mover". A mover is a fetus that constantly turns AWAY from the Ultrasound probe. And so mine is a mover. That poor fetus's arms were flailing, FLAILING, I tell you, I saw it! It's like she was saying "okay, enough already! Stop that racket! Go away!".

Then she started flipping. Yes, she looked like one of those Sea World dolphins. She started turning around and hiding her face, like she had a huge tank of water to do it in. Which was comforting, because I didn't feel a thing. That means that even if I can't feel her, she's still flipping in circles. At one point there was a real cute profile of her.

Adal was really into it. Smart-ass that he is, he started naming everything he saw. "Oh, that's the aorta, right?" "Is that her spine?" "Wow, you can really see the ribcage there." "Oh yeah, it looks like a girl." He impressed the tech, anyway. She was impressed he knew all the terms and could identify the parts. See? Cutting up all those frogs as a Biology undergraduate paid off.

I was at an angle so I could barely see anyway. I didn't understand half the things I saw. It was all a big blob. Except for the flailing. I DEFINITELY saw the flailing. It was the only cool thing I could identify. And her moving and swimming like Flipper.

It was a tough day, laying down all those hours and all, : ) , so I took the rest of the day off...