What is Ultrasound?

An ultrasound machine is used for diagnostic imaging of soft tissue structures such as muscles, tendons, joints and ligaments.

Ultrasound works by sending soundwaves into the body, the sound waves travel through the body and get reflected off different structures within the body. The reflected soundwaves then travel back to the ultrasound transducer to create black and white real time images. This allows us to see things like muscle tears, tendon pathology, swelling and patterns of muscle activation. It will give us extra information to help guide our treatment to ensure the best outcome possible. 

How Can It Help You?

Here at Restore Function Physiotherapy, we will be using it to help guide our management of soft tissue injuries such as ligament sprains, shoulder pain, lower back pain, muscle tears and hip pathologies. We can use the Lumify to help us assess structures that are otherwise difficult to see or feel with traditional physiotherapy assessment techniques. We can also use it as a device to help retrain muscles with visual feedback from the real time videos.

Since the ultrasound image is in real time, we are able to see when and how well a muscle is contracting. For example, many people with low back pain have poor multifidus activation. With the ultrasound we will be able to see the strength and timing of the muscle contracting and we can then use the real time contraction as visual feedback to help you activate and retrain it. The image below shows us a picture of the multifidus muscle captured on the Lumify ultrasound which was used to help a patient with their rehabilitation.