Question: do ultrasounds pick up everything and are they ever faulty?

Laura Haworth answered on 8 Mar 2016:

No as like most imaging modalities we can’t pick up everything and each one is better at picking up different things, so that is often why people can get a mixture- CT, MRI,X-rays or ultrasound to enable us to give us a full picture as they can each tell us different thing. Ultrasound can give us dynamic information as it is not a static image and so we can see the blood flow moving in real time and see how fast it is moving. Like all imaging errors can occur. Artefacts can occur within ultrasound (this opens a lot of physic related questions) which can lead into errors in measurements. In addition we are performing the scan ourselves and acquiring the images whereas with CT it is done by the machine itself; therefore in ultrasound this can lead to variation between operators, which can lead to errors and differences so this needs to be monitored/audited regularly.