How Ultrasound Helps Diagnose Problems

Sound can help you see. It sounds counterintuitive, especially since it doesn’t match what you learned about the senses as a child. Yet sound is used to enhance sight all the time. Sonar on a boat uses sound waves to picture the depth of water, obstacles under you, and even incoming fish. Bats use high-pitched sounds for the echolocation that lets them fly at night and find food. Medical specialists use sound waves in ultrasound to see unborn babies and diagnose problems. Even though sound is usually received by your ears, in the right context, it can be a powerful tool for your foot health.

The ability to see inside your body that diagnostic images provides is, of course, important. It makes a big difference for medical experts like our team at Podiatry Associates, P.C. to be able to accurately treat problems you have. Ultrasound is particularly useful for foot injuries, though, because of what it allows us to “see” that which X-rays do not.

Ultrasound bounces sound waves off the tissues in your body to take snapshots of your feet. Strung together, these snapshots create moving pictures of both your tissues and their movement and function. This is particularly useful for soft-tissue injuries, since they don’t show up clearly on X-rays, and other diagnostic images don’t allow for movement.

This makes it much easier to identify tears in tendons or ligaments, soft tissue masses, and foreign bodies in your feet. These aren’t the only things that this tool can help diagnose, though. It can identify a Morton’s neuroma. It can show bursitis or capsulitis in your joints. In some cases, it can even evaluate the severity of plantar fasciitis. It’s also helpful for guiding direct injections of medication and for planning out surgical procedures.