Columbia Ultrasound found its first applications in livestock research in the 1950's. Since that time, great strides have been made in ultrasound research that 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. This same technology and even identical equipment is used in the beef cattle industry to evaluate reproductive and carcass characteristics. However, for the scope of this article we will concentrate on ultrasound uses for carcass merit prediction, specifically genetic prediction for seedstock producers. The portion of an ultrasound unit that actually emits and receives sound waves is known as a transducer. As sound waves are emitted from the transducer and pass through different tissues with different densities, signals are produced that detect this density change and are passed back to the transducer.