was a Japanese

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate caus ...

credited with introducing the

ultrasonic Ultrasound is sound waves with frequencies higher than the upper audible limit of human hearing. Ultrasound is not different from "normal" (audible) sound in its physical properties, except that humans cannot hear it. This limit varies fr ...

Doppler techniques to practical

medical diagnostics Medical diagnosis (abbreviated Dx, Dx, or Ds) is the process of determining which disease or condition explains a person's symptoms and signs. It is most often referred to as diagnosis with the medical context being implicit. The information re ...

in the 1950s. These techniques made possible non-invasive monitoring of blood flow in the human body.

Life

Satomura was born in 1919 in

Osaka is a designated city in the Kansai region of Honshu in Japan. It is the capital of and most populous city in Osaka Prefecture, and the third most populous city in Japan, following Special wards of Tokyo and Yokohama. With a population of 2. ...

and spent most of his career at various institutions of

Osaka University , abbreviated as , is a public research university located in Osaka Prefecture, Japan. It is one of Japan's former Imperial Universities and a Designated National University listed as a "Top Type" university in the Top Global University Project. ...

. In 1944 he defended his PhD at the School of Physics and then worked at the Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research. In 1952 he became assistant professor and received a

Doctor of Medicine Doctor of Medicine (abbreviated M.D., from the Latin language, Latin ''Medicinae Doctor'') is a medical degree, the meaning of which varies between different jurisdictions. In the United States, and some other countries, the M.D. denotes a profes ...

degree in 1960. He died from a sudden

subarachnoid hemorrhage Subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) is bleeding into the subarachnoid space—the area between the arachnoid membrane and the pia mater surrounding the brain. Symptoms may include a severe headache of rapid onset, vomiting, decreased level of consci ...

at the Osaka University Hospital in the same year and was promoted to the rank of professor posthumously.Shigeo Satomura
History of Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology. ob-ultrasound.net

Research

Satomura initially worked in areas of physics and in 1955 applied microwave and ultrasonic radiation to study defects in industrial materials. His supervisor, Kinjiro Okabe, advised him to extend those techniques to medical diagnosis of the human body. He teamed with cardiac physicians of the Osaka University Hospital and attempted to monitor the pulsations of heart and blood vessels. In December 1955 they published their first measurements of the

Doppler shift The Doppler effect or Doppler shift (or simply Doppler, when in context) is the change in frequency of a wave in relation to an observer who is moving relative to the wave source. It is named after the Austrian physicist Christian Doppler, who d ...

of ultrasonic signals from a beating heart irradiated by 3 MHz waves. This work was extended to design a device measuring the Doppler shifts from pulsating blood vessels, which was described in the ''Journal of the Acoustical Society of America'' in 1957. A commercial version of this device was launched in 1959 by the

NEC is a Japanese multinational corporation, multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered in Minato, Tokyo. The company was known as the Nippon Electric Company, Limited, before rebranding in 1983 as NEC. It prov ...

as the "Doppler Rheograph". The results obtained with the prototype Doppler flowmeter became the core of the doctoral thesis submitted in November 1959 by Satomura. His collaborator Ziro Kaneko, a

neuropsychiatrist Neuropsychiatry or Organic Psychiatry is a branch of medicine that deals with psychiatry as it relates to neurology, in an effort to understand and attribute behavior to the interaction of neurobiology and social psychology factors. Within neurop ...

, proposed to use this technique for monitoring blood flow in the human brain to distinguish the

Alzheimer Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease that usually starts slowly and progressively worsens. It is the cause of 60–70% of cases of dementia. The most common early symptom is difficulty in remembering recent events. As t ...

and

cerebrovascular disease Cerebrovascular disease includes a variety of medical conditions that affect the blood vessels of the brain and the cerebral circulation. Arteries supplying oxygen and nutrients to the brain are often damaged or deformed in these disorders. The ...

s. They started this work in July 1958 and in the same year detected ultrasonic Doppler signals from arteries and veins at the skin surface. The results were presented in October 1958 at the meeting of the Acoustic Society of Japan and published in 1959 in the ''Journal of the Acoustic Society of Japan''. They were popularized in 1959 by the ''

Mainichi Shimbun The is one of the major newspapers in Japan, published by In addition to the ''Mainichi Shimbun'', which is printed twice a day in several local editions, Mainichi also operates an English language news website called ''The Mainichi'' (previ ...

'', a leading newspaper in Japan. By early 1960, Satomura completed two other studies on an "Ultrasonic Doppler Cardiograph" and "Ultrasonic Blood Rheograph". These results were presented by Kaneko in the same year at the Third International Conference on Medical Electronics. Satomura and Kaneko concluded that their Doppler flowmeter could monitor various types of blood flow, via the intensity of the Doppler noise signal, but it could not provide absolute flow values. Their results launched the field of non-invasive spectral analysis of blood flow, including

Doppler echocardiography Doppler echocardiography is a procedure that uses Doppler ultrasonography to examine the heart. An echocardiogram uses high frequency sound waves to create an image of the heart while the use of Doppler technology allows determination of the spee ...

and

Doppler sonography Doppler ultrasonography is medical ultrasonography that employs the Doppler effect to perform imaging of the movement of tissues and body fluids (usually blood), and their relative velocity to the probe. By calculating the frequency shift of ...

. Although a similar device named a "pulsed ultrasound flowmeter" was designed by the Dean Franklin group at the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattle a ...

, Seattle, USA, its sensor had to be directly attached to the blood vessel wall. The Franklin group reported remote Doppler sensing of blood flow only in 1966, citing the work by Satomura and Kaneko.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Satomura, Shigeo Japanese physicists 1919 births 1960 deaths People from Osaka Prefecture Osaka University alumni Osaka University faculty