Day 1 - introduction to project

The beginning of my day mostly consisted of reading the first three chapters of a textbook about diagnostic ultrasound. This laid down the basics so i could understand maria's lesson later. She started out by teaching me how the reflection of sound wave off of an object creates an A-line. then the transducer can be moved to form a vertical 2D slice of the object called a B-scan, after you have acquired multiple B-scans they can be compiled to form a 3D image of the object. The final step is to take a horizontal slice of this object, which is called a C-scan. Next maria started to show me how the equipment was set up. This was fairly straight forward, the transducer was hooked up to a pulser/receiver that would switch between sending the pulse and then reading it. this was hooked up to an oscilloscope which displayed the function as volts on the y-axis and time on the x-axis. then the oscilloscope was hooked back up to the pulser/receiver to stabilize the image in one location. The pulser/receiver also had dials to set the HPF(high pass filter) and LPF(low pass filter), both of these are used to filter out the image to show the most important wave, the first reflection. The rest of the day was spent learning how to use all parts of the oscilloscope.