New Diagnostics for Common Childhood Infections

Abstract

In the broadest sense, noninvasive prenatal testing began in the 1970s, when the first articulated-arm diagnostic ultrasound machines produced two-dimensional images of fetuses in utero. Initially, the crude new imaging technology was eagerly adopted for the simple measurement of embryos, fetuses, and fetal parts to develop normative data for gestational-age determination. But as technology and image quality rapidly improved, it quickly became obvious that fetal anatomy could be defined with increasing precision.