how accurate are ultrasounds?
Your question How accurate can you be when telling the baby’s gender by ultrasound? The expert answers The person doing your ultrasound is the only person who can accurately answer this question specifically for you. However, it should be very accurate (close to 100 percent). The best time to determine gender is around 20 weeks gestation. By 20 weeks the fetus is big enough to see the anatomy clearly, yet small enough to move around within the uterus to allow a clear view between the legs. There are a host of factors that come in to play when trying to determine gender by ultrasound. The amount of amniotic fluid around the baby, the position of the baby and the thickness of the maternal abdominal wall all play an important role. Gender is determined by simply looking between the baby’s legs. So, how accurate the determination is really depends on how well the sonographer can see between the baby’s legs. An experienced sonographer, a good amount of amniotic fluid, a patient with a thin
If you are told your baby appears normal, will this always be true? Or if you are told that your baby has major problems, will this always be true? How likely is it that the results you will be given will be right or wrong? The answer is that like any prenatal testing, ultrasound results are not always correct. There are “false positive” results (where a baby is wrongly diagnosed as having a problem) and “false negative” results (where the ultrasound results appear normal but the baby actually does have a problem). Keep in mind that it is never possible to be 100% sure about prenatal testing results. It is very clear from the research that the effectiveness of the ultrasound depends greatly on the quality of the equipment used and the skill of the technician using it. There are very clearly more “false positives” and “false negatives” from ultrasound technicians who have not received special training in the use of ultrasonography, or from those who are using a less-powerful machine. So
Related Questions
- Two ultrasound techs now have told me that, where dating a pregnancy is concerned, ultrasounds are most accurate between 4 weeks and 14 weeks. If your regular doctor was only going by your last menstrual period, I think the ultrasound is more accurate.
- How accurate are ultrasounds done at 34 weeks and over in predicting the gender of baby?
- how accurate are ultrasounds?