It's funny because it’s true.... but don’t be this person! Overuse of gain can result in a washed out image and unnecessary noise. Before reaching for that gain control, consider your contact, transducer choice, and frequency.

All ultrasounds have gain control. It’s often a knob, button, and/or a series of sliders on the console, and it’s one of the most used and adjusted scanning parameters... but do you know what it really does?

For this latest blog installment, I have decided to go a bit off topic. As a small business owner, I am asked all the time—how, or more importantly why, do you run an engineering and manufacturing company in the U.S. these days. Well, it is a great question and one that keeps me up at night.

E.I. Medical Imaging, Loveland, CO

You cannot turn on the news, regardless of how you get your news, to hear the dismal stories of American manufacturing jobs leaving the US. We are not here to get into a political debate, but the statistics do not lie. Don’t get me wrong, things are improving, but of all small business firms in the US, only 2% are categorized as manufacturing firms.¹

All ultrasounds have gain control. It’s often a knob, button, and/or a series of sliders on the console, and it’s one of the most used and adjusted scanning parameters... but do you know what it really does?

Most people think of gain as a brightness adjuster, and while it’s true that turning your gain up will brighten the image, it’s helpful to understand how it actually works. Gain is a uniform amplification of the ultrasonic signal that is returning to the transducer after it travels through the tissue. So rather than brightening the monitor, the image on the screen is whitened by a uniform margin, as though the returning signal is stronger than it is, to make it easier to see.