Question: do you agree that ultrasound scanners are not effective in diagnosing or seeing certain tissues - and they are more likely to give a misdiagnosis?

Thomas Biggans answered on 20 Jun 2016:

Every type of imaging has its advantages and disadvantages.

For ultrasound the main problem is bone, air in the lungs and bowel gas all of which hide the structures beneath them from the scanner. There is also the issue that to see deeper inside you have to sacrifice resolution which means something that is small and deep will probably not show up on the ultrasound image.

Then you have the organs themselves, You can see alot of detail in the liver on ultrasound images but you can’t really make out anything about the spleen other than where it is and how big it is. Ultrasound is a great tool for imaging of the heart because you can image the structures and function in real time.

So yes there are some tissues that ultrasound isn’t very good at imaging and that’s why it won’t be used if we’re interested in those tissues. In terms of misdiagnosis you would only use ultrasound as a test if the chance of misdiagnosis was small but no imaging technique is perfect, there’s always a chance the result is wrong.