Medical ultrasound is a medical imaging diagnostic technology based on ultrasound that visualizes soft tissues such as muscles and internal organs, including their size, structure, and pathological lesions. Obstetric ultrasound is widely used for prenatal diagnosis during pregnancy.
The choice of ultrasound frequency is a compromise between the spatial resolution of the image and the depth of patient exploration. A typical diagnostic ultrasound scanning operation uses a frequency range of 2 to 13 MHz.
Although the term "ultrasound" used in physics is used to refer to all frequencies above the upper hearing threshold of the human ear (20,000 Hz), in medical imaging it usually refers to sound waves with a frequency band more than one hundred times higher.
