Industrial flaw detector is an extension of sonar technology in peacetime, which was used to detect enemy submarines during World War II. A warship equipped with sonar emits bursts of acoustic energy in the form of a "bang" sound in the water. If the submarine lurks under the waves, these sounds will hit the hard surface of the submarine and return to the warship as echo bombs. The analysis of the echo will (hopefully) reveal the position of the submarine in order to attack and sink it.
B& amp； W's industrial flaw detector works on the same principle, that is, ultrasonic waves are reflected from steel welds. Analyze the generated echoes to see if they find any invisible defects in the weld.
Classify it as
Dr Donald wants to know whether this technology can also be used to observe things hidden in the human body. The * * * in the trip showed hope, so Donald Wanger sent a second invitation to the boiler workers. This time, he brought some medical samples such as cysts and tumors for analysis; B& amp； W gave him a steak, which he could use as a control sample of healthy tissues without tumors or cysts. Twenty years later, Donald recalled that the result "exceeded my biggest expectation". "In the years to come, I can see infinite possibilities."
crazy
Donald can see these possibilities, but his colleagues can't. A long time ago, they nicknamed him "Crazy Donald" because he was fascinated by gadgets and tried to integrate them into medicine. Although Donald has achieved some success, including the equipment to help struggling newborns breathe for the first time, the idea of sending tumors and cysts to the shipyard boiler plant has not helped his professional reputation.
Donald is not the only one who is interested in ultrasound: researchers in Europe and Japan and researchers in the United States are also experimenting, and their research has begun to appear in medical journals. But if Donald's colleagues know this, it makes no difference. When he borrowed an old defect detector from a neurologist in London and tried (but failed) to scan the human brain from the outside of the skull, all he did was give other doctors a chance to go to his office and let them laugh at his experiment.
To be fair, these experiments were considerable in the early days. The only way for him to make the flaw detector work is to apply vaseline to the bottom of the plastic bucket, and keep it unstable in the patient's abdomen, then fill the bucket with water and immerse the ultrasonic probe in the bucket. Usually, the only result is water splashing on the patient, the doctor and the floor, forcing Donald to start over, assuming the patient is willing to risk getting wet again.
Helping hand
These early results are so disappointing that Donald may have finished his research if some electricians and Kelvin &; Hughes, which produces defect detectors, did not install lights in nearby operating rooms. When the electrician saw him scanning the patient's detector with a bucket, they passed on this absurd sight to Kelvin, 23, and Hughes engineer thom browne, who is a member of the defect detector department. Brown is very interested. He looked up crazy Donald in the phone book, called him and asked him if he could drop by the office. The doctor agreed, and Brown soon noticed that Donald's flaw detector was not only out of date, but also improved and almost useless. He made some phone calls to Kevin Hughes' boss, and a brand-new and state-of-the-art flaw detector will be delivered to Donald's office soon.
Put the meat in the new machine.
Squash, no longer need to balance the bucket of the patient's abdomen: all Donald has to do is smear the patient's abdomen with olive oil, and then check the area with an ultrasonic probe. Sound waves penetrate the human body, and the echoes produced appear on the screen of a device called an oscilloscope in the form of electric pulses. Donald has long suspected that fluid-filled cysts and tumors have different ultrasonic "features", and tumors are dense tissue blocks. His earliest experiments in the boiler plant also proved this point, and now the new equipment also confirmed this point. However, his colleagues once again denied his discovery. Then, a surgical professor asked him to examine a hopeless case, a woman who died of inoperable gastric cancer.
Donald smeared the woman's severely swollen abdomen with olive oil and examined the area with his probe. A flick: the industrial flaw detector shows a fluid sac with a clear edge, which is characterized by a cyst, rather than obtaining a reading consistent with cancer cells. The dying woman didn't die at all. She has no cancer either. After Donald surgically removed the benign ovarian cyst he correctly diagnosed, she made a full recovery.
The voice is beautiful,
Crazy Donald suddenly doesn't look crazy at all. His strange shipyard device is no longer ashamed to hide. Soon every doctor has a patient who is difficult to scan. A few years later, Donald recalled: "As long as we get rid of the secret room attitude, bring our equipment to the department and bring a steady stream of life patients with fascinating clinical problems, we can make rapid progress." . "Now, it is impossible to turn back."
Become the focus
Although this new machine is better than the one it replaced, there are still many places to be improved. When Donald scans the patient, all he sees on the oscilloscope is the curve. He distinguished tumors from cysts, which was enough for him. However, thom browne, a young engineer from Kevin Hughes, thinks he can do better. By the end of 1957, he had finished the work of improving a machine, which can track the position of the probe on the patient and draw the echo on the oscilloscope screen accordingly. In the process, he invented the first ultrasonic scanner, which can produce spectrograms, because people already know that these images are not curves. Money is too tight. He actually made this machine with borrowed sickbed tables and parts from installers. )
Preview view
By the summer of 1958, Donald, Brown and the third researcher John McVicar had scanned more than 100 people. They published their findings in the British medical journal The Lancet, and also published some ultrasonic images of human fetuses in utero. Believe it or not, when scanning a woman who is thought to have a uterine tumor, the researchers found that ultrasound can accidentally produce these images, which may lead to abdominal distension. It was not until a baby's head appeared on the screen that they realized that abdominal distension was caused by a more common situation: pregnancy only occurred when the baby died at birth. But now it can be detected by ultrasonic scanning. Because of this, Rona had a caesarean section, and her son Tom is still alive to commemorate his grandfather. In an interview with BBC on 20 13, Brown said: "The baby gave birth safely, and now it is a very smart and lovely little boy. Grandpa wouldn't be here if it weren't for his past work. " . Uncle John's canoe bathroom reader is 544 pages long and shows the world around us from a wide angle. It is full of all expectations of BRI fans for this bestseller: fascinating history, stupid science, obscure origins, plus fashion, mistakes, word games, quotations, and some surprises. The bathroom readers' association led the movement to stand up for those who sit in the bathroom and read books (and anywhere else). Uncle John's Bathroom Reader is the longest published and most popular series in the world, with a print run of over 6.5438+0.5 million copies.
If you like what I found today, I believe you will also like reading in the bathroom, so go and have a look.
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