| Summary: | Ultrasound (the frequency range above 20 KHz) at intensities of 0-3.0 Wcm-2 is used in physical medicine to treat a variety of conditions (joint contractures, fibrosis and scarring and severe pain due to disorders such as frozen shoulder and capsulitis). It is believed to produce a reduction in pain and swelling and increase movement of joints affected by diseases such as arthritis. It is also used to generate hyperthermia for the treatment of neoplastic tumours. The technique involves irradiating tissues with either continuous or pulsed mode ultrasound, using either the field from a single or multielement transducer. Geometrically similar ultrasound transducers even from the same batch can have significantly different efficiencies and the resulting field distributions can also vary. There are several pieces of information required to characterize an ultrasound source. They are frequency, power output, spatial average and spatial peak intensity and details of ultrasonic field distribution. This application of ultrasound requires an experimental method to define the intensity distribution generated by a transducer or array of transducers. A number of different techniques have been used to record intensity distribution. These include sheets of liquid crystal on an absorbing surface, detection of signals using hydrophone probes, thermocouple probes, thermistor probes and the Schlieren technique. The dye/paper method and Starch iodine plate have been developed for the observation of the ultrasonic fields and evaluation of the source pattern.
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