Homemade ultrasound coupling gel is just as effective as commercially produced varieties, offering an alternative in low-resource healthcare settings, according to a study published online September 9 in the Journal of Ultrasound in Medicine.
Commercial ultrasound gels can be hard to obtain and cost-prohibitive in rural regions of low-income countries that use sonography as their primary imaging tool, wrote a team led by Dr. Anjuli Cherukuri of the University of Colorado-Denver in Aurora. Cherukuri and colleagues created and tested a variety of homemade gels to determine whether they performed as well as commercial products in terms of image quality.
Gels based on glucomannan and on guar gum showed no substantial difference compared with commercially available ultrasound gel, and neither required heating, attracted insects, damaged ultrasound transducers, stained clothing, or had harmful effects to subjects, the researchers found.
