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Shake No Bake: A Homemade Ultrasound Gel Recipe for Low‐Resource Settings
Author(s) -
Cherukuri Anjuli R.,
Lane Lucy,
Guy Dave,
Perusse Karina,
Keating David P.,
DeStigter Kristen K.
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
journal of ultrasound in medicine
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.574
H-Index - 91
eISSN - 1550-9613
pISSN - 0278-4297
DOI - 10.1002/jum.14788
Subject(s) - medicine , ultrasound , economic shortage , guar gum , imaging phantom , biomedical engineering , surgery , radiology , pathology , linguistics , philosophy , government (linguistics)
Commercially produced ultrasound coupling gel is often a scarce resource in rural regions of low‐income countries that use sonography as their main imaging modality and, when available, may be cost prohibitive. Various homemade gels were created and tested to assure image quality was not compromised. Glucomannan‐based gel and guar gum–based gel had superior physical properties in initial testing and showed no substantial difference compared with commercially available ultrasound gel on subject and phantom imaging and analysis ( P > .05 using a 1‐tailed sign test). Neither gel required heating, attracted insects, damaged ultrasound transducers, stained samples of clothing, or had harmful effects to subjects.