Echocardiography (cardiac ultrasound)
Ecocardiografía (ultrasonidos del corazón)
- Date
- 29 de octubre de 1953 · confidence high
- Place
- Lund University Hospital, Lund, Sweden
- Credited to
- Inge Edler and Carl Hellmuth Hertz
- Field
- Life & health
What it is
The cardiologist Edler and the physicist Hertz recorded the movement of heart structures in 1953 with a borrowed industrial Siemens ultrasonic reflectoscope. It was the first clinical use of ultrasound to see the heart.
The first recording with the borrowed device was made on 29 October 1953. Medical uses of ultrasound (Dussik, 1942; Wild and Donald in the 1950s) were parallel; Edler and Hertz are the pioneers of the heart.
What it led to
- M-mode echocardiography for valve disease, especially mitral stenosis
- two-dimensional and Doppler echocardiography in later decades
- cardiac diagnosis without radiation or surgery