Possible Uses in Genetic Prediction William Herring Department of Animal Science Ultrasound found its first applications in livestock research in the 1950s. Since that time, the great strides that have been made in ultrasound research have benefited both human medicine and the livestock industry.
Most people probably associate ultrasound with human fetal examination.
In human medicine, it is most commonly used in routine pregnancy exams and sex determination. However, this publication concentrates on the use of ultrasound to predict carcass merit, specifically genetic prediction for seedstock producers. Real-time ultrasound imaging is a noninvasive way of seeing inside a human body or an animal. Ultrasound transducers acquire the images displayed on a monitor. As sound waves are emitted from the transducer and pass through tissues with different densities, the echoes passed back to the transducer show this density change.