Ian Donald School Book 09.indb - World Association of Perinatal ...

Chapter 1. PROF. IAN DONALD (1910-1987)True tissue differentiation was only to come many years later, especially with the developmentof grey scaling. Nevertheless, at this time in 1958 they could differentiatewith reasonable certainty between quite a variety of gynecological tumors and ascitesboth benign and malignant (the latter having a characteristically bizarre appearance)and, of course, gross obesity. They could also demonstrate fetal echoes in utero, particularlythe fetal head provided the uterus was enlarged above the level of the smyphysispubis.Donald’s team first went to press in The Lancet in 1958 and he regarded this as oneof the most important papers he had ever written, noteworthy also because there had,so far, been no subsequent need to repeal anything he had then written.The automatic B scanner was completed in 1960 and Donald and his team were ableto identify and measure biparietal diameter accurately.The biparietal cephalometry had a remarkable development. The glimpses which theyobtained with a hand-held probe left insufficient time to measure the distancebetween the relevant blips from the parietal eminences on the cathode ray tube face.Accordingly, his colleague Tom Brown borrowed from his employers a two-channelgated flaw alarm unit which triggered a solenoid-operated polaroid camera from whosephotographs measurements could be accurately made. This was an ingenious devicewith which it was hoped to simplify biparietal cephalometry in the course of randomsearching in the region of the anterior fetal parietal bone. A physicist, TomDuggan, joined the team. He introduced electronic cursors consisting of bright-up dotswhich could be placed by knob manipulation on the leading edges of the blips andprovide a digital read-out of the distance between them. This proved even more accurateand saved money on photographic materials.Lecturing room an the Ian Donald School in Dubrovnik.11