Clinical Doppler Ultrasound

Author: Chief Editor: Jiao Mingde et al
Publisher:
Publish Date: 1999-12-01
Features: Excerpt: On the Development of Doppler Ultrasound It is well-known that as early as 1842, Christian Johann Doppler (1803–1853), a 39-year-old Austrian mathematician and physicist, published a famous paper titled "On the colored light waves of binary stars and certain stars," reporting that in his research, the light waves emitted by binary stars in celestial motion tended toward red. He believed this was due to the relative motion between planets and observers, causing a change in the frequency of light waves and thus a change in color. He proposed that "in a continuous medium, when the source of waves moves relative to the receiver, the frequency of the waves received by the receiver changes. When the source and receiver approach each other, the frequency increases; conversely, when they move apart, the frequency decreases." This is the famous Doppler effect. Subsequently, Dutch scholar BuysBallot (1845) conducted research on sound and found that the Doppler effect also applies to sound waves, laying the foundation for the application of the Doppler effect in biomedicine. The application of Doppler ultrasound technology in clinical medicine began in the 1950s, with its pioneers being the Japanese scholar Shigeo Satomura. In the initial stage, it was an attempt to use ultrasound technology to observe the subtle oscillations of solid tissues. Later, at the suggestion of Okabe, Shigeo Satomura and others began to apply Doppler ultrasound to study heart activity in 1955. The following year, they were the first to report Doppler curves of the mitral valve, aortic valve, and pulmonary valve. Afterward, Lindstrom