A Cultural Understanding of Ultrasound Technology in Pregnancy Management: A Review of the Literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Obstetric ultrasound imaging has become a routine practice of pregnancy management globally, including in many low-and middle-income countries. Ultrasound imaging is, essentially, an introduction of a new technology in health care. New technologies get incorporated into routine practice when they meet a need and align with the user's culture, described as patterns of thoughts, behaviors, and practices. Given pregnancy management practices are culturally informed, both in the lay and biomedical realm, we hypothesize introduction of obstetric ultrasound has impacted the culture of pregnancy management. We conducted a systematic review of the literature. A comprehensive search of five databases yielded 45 peer-reviewed articles. All articles were assessed for quality and analyzed using a critical interpretive synthesis approach. The literature shows that in many low and middle-income countries, ultrasonography is the most common, and sometimes the only care received by pregnant women, often to the neglect of all other forms of antenatal care. This is happening because mothers seem to understand obstetric ultrasound as an all-powerful tool that cannot only identify, but also treat any maternal/fetal abnormalities. They overestimate the diagnostic abilities of the technology, believing it can deliver the ‘perfect baby’. It seems it is the commercialization of the technology, driven by profit-seeking providers, that has played a significant role in steering these beliefs and practices. With a high demand for non-medically indicated ultrasound scans, healthcare providers in both public, and primarily private clinics, profit considerably by meeting patient requests. The use of obstetric ultrasound as the only antenatal care sought and provided during pregnancy can have serious negative implications on fetal and maternal health. Publication History Publication Date: 17 September 2021 (online) © 2021. Thieme. All rights reserved. Thieme Medical Publishers, Inc. 333 Seventh Avenue, 18th Floor, New York, NY 10001, USA
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.042 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.012 | 0.014 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".