Could ultrasound replace the stethoscope?

From the article:

Ultrasound is an old technology, with roots in the sonar scanners used during the Second World War. For decades, it’s been used mainly to inspect fetuses while they’re still in the womb, and to examine diseased hearts. But, in the past few decades, rapid advances in computer technology, combined with the trial-and-error work of clinicians, have transformed ultrasound into a powerful diagnostic instrument for everything from damaged organs to tuberculosis. If ultrasound’s evangelists are correct, it may soon replace the stethoscope as the quintessential doctor’s tool. Its rise, meanwhile, reveals something about how technology works. In some cases, inventions arrive fully formed. But others reveal their true potential slowly, truly coming into their own with the passage of time.

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The first wave of substantial improvements came through digitization. As silicon chips replaced vacuum tubes, ultrasound benefitted from Moore’s Law; image quality improved dramatically even as the size of the machines shrank. Manufacturers simplified their user interfaces, making the machines accessible to non-techies. In the nineteen-nineties, darpa, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, awarded a grant to design an ultrasound unit that was portable and durable enough to be carried onto the battlefield. In 1999, a company called Sonosite released a commercial version—the first handheld ultrasound device. The race toward miniaturization continued: today, there are ultrasound machines that can plug into your smartphone.

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Clinicians now use ultrasound to diagnose pneumonia, cirrhosis, blood clots, tuberculosis, tendon tears, detached retinas, bowel obstructions, appendicitis, bleeding in the eye, rheumatoid arthritis, gout, aortic dissection, and kidney stones, among other problems; they use it to site I.V.s in patients with difficult-to-find blood vessels, and to provide targeted pain injections that can reduce the need for opioids.

This versatility has proved particularly valuable in places with limited access to medical care. “I basically bring the ultrasound into every patient visit,” Ashley Weisman, an emergency-medicine doctor who practices primarily in rural areas, told me. For a time, Weisman worked at a small hospital in Kotzebue, Alaska—one of the most remote hospitals in the United States. She began using ultrasound for home visits and in village clinics. “You might have a patient in their sixties or seventies with shortness of breath, but to get them to a clinic—you have no ambulance, some of these villages don’t even have roads,” she said. “But you can go to their house and do lung ultrasound at the bedside, and figure out it’s their heart failure that flared up, and change their meds. You don’t necessarily have to strap them to the back of someone’s A.T.V. or put them on a plane.”

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