New article traces contributions of an engineer and physician collaborators looking to assess the heart from the outside in
Fifty-one years ago the average American home cost $30,000, Elvis Presley wooed listeners with Hard Headed Woman, and the hula hoop was introduced. That same year, 1958, a team comprised of a groundbreaking engineer -- Dean Franklin -- in concert with two exceptional physicians -- Drs. Robert Rushmer and Robert Van Citters - was laying the foundation for what would eventually become a radical new approach to health care: the noninvasive imaging and treatment of the heart. The discoveries of these pioneers would eventually lead to a doctor's ability to see the heart without cutting open the body; allow patients to have their hearts monitored despite being miles away; and provide reassurance to parents that a fetus' heart was normal rather than waiting until the offspring was born.
The details of these efforts are chronicled in a new article, "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Dean Franklin and His Remarkable Contributions to Physiological Measurements in Animals," by R. Dustan Sarazan and Karl T.R. Schweitz. The article appears in the September 2009 edition of Advances in Physiological Education (http://advan.physiology.org/cgi/content/full/33/3/144). The American Physiological Society (APS; www.the-aps.org) publishes the quarterly journal. The APS has been an integral part of the scientific discovery process since it was founded in 1887.
Dean Franklin: Ultrasound, Ultrasonic Transit Flow Meter, and Doppler Flow
Dean Franklin was a teenager during World War II, but was drafted in 1950 and selected for training in radar. He subsequently became chief instructor in the U.S. Army's advanced radar school. In 1952, he was recruited by Boeing to work on the BOMARC missile project and was later hired as an electronics technician in the laboratory of Robert Rushmer at the University of Washington Medical School.
Initially, Franklin's role was limited to fabricating the Whitney gauge, a relatively crude device that could be attached to a dog's heart tissue to measure cardiac dimensions. At the time, Rushmer was pioneering the concept of collecting cardiovascular data from conscious animals with implanted instrumentation, instead of the unconscious, open-heart animals that were the standard. While working in Rushmer's laboratory Franklin melded what he learned about the cardiovascular system with what he had learned about radar during his military service. With the support of Dr. Rushmer, a pediatrician and physiologist with a great interest in the heart, they were able to develop ultrasound instruments to measure blood flow, despite the prevailing view of the late 1950s that ultrasonic measurements of blood flow were impossible. Franklin's device was successful enough to be among the first breakthroughs to use ultrasound for physiologic measurements. It was used, for the first time, on conscious animals and eventually humans.
By 1962, Franklin and a colleague had invented the first fully functional ultrasonic transit time flow meter, which measures blood flow in intact arteries; the sonocardiometer, which measures the dimensions of the heart; and the ultrasonic Doppler flow meter, which measures the velocity of liquids containing suspended particles such as red blood cells. As a result of these developments, a new generation of scientists launched the first noninvasive ultrasound imaging devices, which are now the industry standard in human medical technology. These devices are descended directly from Franklin's first flowmeter and sonocardiometer.
Scripps Clinic and the San Diego Zoo