> Yikes! This is brilliant innovation, but it should come with a pretty serious warning somewhere about the potential dangers of medical ultrasound. While the jury is still out about a lot of things, there are major reasons why the NHS in Britain discourages expectant mothers from having private "4D" scans and additional procedures.

This is an overstatement of the available evidence. The link you post says so itself:

> These studies have found no evidence that ultrasound affects mortality around the time of pregnancy or birth, or has any effect on childhood cancers. In randomised-controlled trials there has been ‘weak evidence’ that it may affect whether a child is right or left handed (known as handedness), which the reviewers say may be the result of confounding, rather than actual causation.

I cringe when I read well-meaning but irrelevant warnings like the one you gave. To me, these warnings are somewhere between naysaying and spreading FUD. The NHS wants to make sure that millions of people don't take unnecessary ultrasounds, since a tiny risk, multiplied by millions, equals a few unnecessary deaths/left-handed children. The individual risk of unnecessary ultrasounds, however, is extremely low compared to the usual risks of pregrancy and childbirth.

Many medical devices are unnecessarily expensive (and suprisingly badly designed, from a user-interface standpoint). There are already enough regulatory hurdles in place that prevent disruption of the medical device markets, let us not add to these hurdles by being overly cautious!