Abstract
By definition, ultrasound is sound with a frequency greater than 20000 cycles per second; that is, the sound is above the audible range. The principal advantages of high-frequency sound or ultrasound as a medical diagnostic tool are: 1) ultrasound can be directed in a beam, 2) it obeys the laws of reflection and refraction, and 3) it is reflected by objects of small size. The principal disadvantage of ultrasound is that it propagates poorly through a gaseous medium. When discussing any type of sound, one must understand what a cycle, wavelength, velocity, and frequencies are. A sound wave is a series of compressions and rarefactions, and these changes are frequently depicted as a sine wave, with the peak of the hill representing the pressure maximum and the nadir of the valley the pressure minimum. The combination of one compression and one rarefaction represents one cycle, and the distance between the peak compression of one cycle to the next is the wavelength. The velocity represents the speed at which sound waves travel through a particular medium. The frequency is the number of cycles in a given time. Thus, the velocity is equal to the frequency times the wavelength. The velocity at which sound travels through a medium depends on the density and elastic properties of the medium. In other words, sound travels faster through a dense medium than through a less dense substance. Velocity also depends on temperature. The velocity of sound is fairly constant for human soft tissue, approximately 1540 m/s (meters per second).
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Hori, M., Masuyama, T., Baba, K., Ohshiro, O., Ishihara, K., Kondo, H. (2004). Imaging of Tissue/Organs with Ultrasound. In: Furukawa, T. (eds) Biological Imaging and Sensing. Biological and Medical Physics, Biomedical Engineering. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-06081-0_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-06081-0_2
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