Help your students
truly visualize
ultrasound physics.
The Interactive Physics Companion™ teaches ultrasound physics through visuals and interaction. Students predict, change something, and watch what happens, so every concept becomes something they can picture and feel confident with, on the device they already study on. Built by a registered sonographer.
Four lessons, running right here
These are not mockups. They are excerpts from the course itself, exactly as they appear and exactly as they behave when a student works through the lesson.
1. What happens when a crystal fails
A mechanical transducer has one piezoelectric element. It produces the sound, receives the echoes, and creates every line in the image, and there is no backup.
If that one crystal fails, what happens to the image?
Every lesson makes the student commit to an answer first. That single act is what turns reading into learning, because a student who has predicted something is invested in finding out whether they were right.
The wrong answers matter as much as the right one. Notice that choosing "a band drops out" does not just say incorrect. It names the specific reason a student would think that, which is that they are picturing an array probe, and then corrects it. Students find out where their reasoning broke, not just that it did.
Every line in that fan came from the same element.
Watching the whole sector go black is what makes it stick. A student who has seen that will never again answer "a band of dropout" for a mechanical probe, because they are recalling something they watched rather than a sentence they read.
2. Axial resolution and spatial pulse length
Two reflectors sit one behind the other. A pulse travels down, bounces off both, and two echoes come back. Whether the machine can separate them depends entirely on how long that pulse is.
The system sends one LONG pulse. What comes back?
These run on their own. Watch the two echoes on the way back, then switch the pulse length.
Watch the pulse leave the probe, strike the first reflector, and start home. Then watch the second echo set off behind it. With a short pulse the two arrive as two separate signals. With a long pulse they are still overlapping when they reach the probe, and what returns is one long smear rather than two events.
That is a live visual of something a student cannot get from a static diagram. A textbook can draw the finished result and tell them why. Here they watch the two echoes run into each other in real time, and the definition arrives afterwards describing what they just saw.
3. Temporal resolution and frame rate
Frame rate is the one topic a still diagram cannot teach, because the whole idea is time. Both panels run for the same stretch of time. The red marker is one pulse travelling out and back, and each line lights when its echo returns.
You increase the imaging depth to look at something deeper. What happens to your frame rate?
The squares at the bottom count whole frames finished in one identical loop.
Both panels are given exactly the same amount of time. The shallow one finishes two whole frames. The deep one finishes one. Nothing is explained, and nothing needs to be, because the student has just watched the machine run out of time.
"The deeper you scan, the lower the frame rate" is normally a line to memorize. Here it is something they observe, which is why it survives the walk into the exam room.
4. Doppler angle and the cosine relationship
Doppler only detects motion heading toward or away from the probe. It cannot see motion moving sideways across the beam. So the angle between the beam and the flow decides how much of the blood's speed the machine gets to measure. Same vessel and same blood speed in all four panels. The only thing changing is the angle.
You just learned the angle decides how much of the flow the beam can see. Which Doppler angle gives you the largest shift?
Four angles, one vessel, one blood speed. Watch only the bar change.
The Doppler angle is one of the most important clinical concepts in the curriculum and one of the most heavily tested. Students lose it because they focus on memorizing the formula and overthinking the trigonometry, when the whole idea is simply how much of the flow the beam is lined up with.
Here they toggle through the angles and watch the measurable fraction change while the blood never speeds up or slows down. The 90 degree panel is the one that lands hardest, because a bar that empties completely is far more memorable than being told the cosine is zero.
5. Gain and time gain compensation
Two controls that both make an image brighter, and students mix them up constantly. Watching them run next to each other is what separates them for good.
The bottom of your image is too dark but the top looks right. Which control fixes it?
Watch the lower sliders travel further than the upper ones. That difference is the whole idea.
Gain multiplies every returning echo by the same factor, so every band of the picture moves by exactly the same amount and the difference between shallow and deep is left where it was. TGC applies a different amount at each depth, which is why it can lift the bottom of the image without touching the top.
Students memorize that distinction and then lose it under exam pressure, because on paper both controls just say brighter. Running them side by side gives them something to recall instead of a sentence.
6. The SPI mock exam simulator BONUS
A full length timed exam sits inside the same course. 110 questions, two hours, flag anything you want to come back to and jump around the way you will on the day. At the end it returns a scaled score, a breakdown by content area, and a written read on what to actually do about it.
At which Doppler angle will the measured frequency shift be greatest?
Jump to any question. Filled is answered, an orange edge is flagged.
Same scoring, same explanations and the same guidance a student gets after every mock.
Most practice exams hand a student a number. This one reads the score back to them in plain language, then reads the domains, then names the module to go back to. A student who scores 528 does not have to work out what to do with that.
The flag is doing real work too. A student who flagged a question and then got it wrong was unsure while they were answering, which is a different problem from a careless slip, and the review says so. That distinction is one an instructor would normally have to draw for them.
All of it only works because the teaching and the testing sit in the same place. A standalone question bank can tell a student they are weak in Doppler. It cannot send them to the lesson that teaches it.
Physics is not an information problem
Your students have the textbook, the slides and the notes, and most of them read all of it. What they cannot do is picture it.
This is an abstract subject taught almost entirely in words. Students are asked to hold a moving, invisible thing in their heads from a paragraph and a still diagram, and then they are asked to reason about it under exam conditions. They are not failing to work hard. They are being handed too little visual information to build the picture the questions depend on, which is exactly why the relationships never connect.
They also study on their phones, their iPads and their laptops, and they are comfortable there. This was built to meet them where they already are. It travels with them, it works in the gaps between clinicals, and it complements the curriculum they are already sitting in rather than competing with it.
Generation effect
Every lesson asks a student to predict an outcome before it shows one. Producing an answer, even a wrong one, is what makes the correction stick.
Dual coding
Words and a moving picture of the same idea, at the same time. Two routes into memory instead of one.
Immediate feedback
Wrong answers get a specific explanation of that misconception, not a red cross. Students find out where their reasoning broke.
Retrieval practice
Knowledge checks throughout, not just at the end, so recall is trained rather than reading being repeated.
Chunking
Fifteen modules of short lessons. One idea each, finishable in a sitting.
Conceptual learning
Formulas arrive after the mechanism, so students understand what they are calculating instead of memorizing a string of letters.
Fifteen modules, sixty-five lessons
Sequenced the way physics is actually taught, and mapped against the domains the SPI examines.
Foundations to transducers
Foundations · Describing sound waves · Pulsed sound · How sound interacts with media · Transducers · Sound beams · Display modes
Imaging to Doppler
Two-dimensional imaging · Resolution · Pulsed echo instrumentation and image processing · Harmonics and contrast agents · Hemodynamics · Doppler physics and optimization · Artifacts · Bioeffects, QA and professional responsibility
The curriculum is built in alignment with the ARDMS SPI examination content outline, and covers the physics components examined by ARRT and CCI. Programs are encouraged to verify current content outlines directly with the awarding body.
What students send us
Unedited messages sent to Tech Me Out. Many came from students who had already failed the SPI before they found these resources. Scores are as the students reported them.
"I had already attempted the SPI once and only scored a 550. I was studying SO much, using different programs, reading the book, doing practice questions nonstop, and still felt like something just wasn't clicking for me. After taking her course, I passed my SPI with a 669."
"I just wanted to thank you for making this course. I've taken it 4 times before you helped me finally pass."
"I passed my physics course with an A thanks to you. And a HUGE thank you for your SPI crash course, I went and took my SPI this past weekend and walked out of there with a 638. You truly helped me find my confidence in ultrasound physics."
"The way you break things down and explain concepts made everything finally click, especially the topics I struggled with the most. I went into my exam feeling so much more confident because of you, and that's something I didn't think I'd ever say about physics."
ARDMS reported a first-time pass rate of 72% and an overall pass rate of 65% as of 2023. Read the other way round, more than a quarter of your students will not pass on their first attempt, and better than a third of every attempt sat ends in a fail.
That is not a group of students who did not work. It is largely students who memorized physics without ever understanding it, and who then met a question that asked them to apply it. Setting a student up properly the first time costs a program far less than a retake does.
Built by one sonographer
Tech Me Out began in 2023 with a single set of physics flashcards. It is now a full line of study resources used by students across four continents, and every lesson in the Companion was written, drawn and built by its founder.
It is genuinely easy to add
The Companion sits alongside whatever textbook you already use. It does not replace your lectures and it does not ask you to change your curriculum.
1. A faculty desk copy
45 days of full access for faculty in your program to review it. No contract, no purchase order and nothing to implement.
2. A code for your students
A discount code specific to your program. Students purchase individually, the way they would a textbook, and create their own account after payment.
3. One link for your syllabus
That is the whole setup. Nothing to install and nothing for your department to administer.
If your department would rather purchase access for a whole cohort, that can be arranged instead. Note it in the form below.
Request access for your program
Faculty desk copies give full access to the Interactive Physics Companion™ and the SPI mock exam simulator for 45 days, so you can review it properly before deciding whether it fits your program.
Program rates for students are available on request. Tell us about your program and your cohort below, and we will send the details that apply to you.
No obligation and nothing is charged. Desk copy access runs for 45 days.
No student should feel like they
have to navigate this alone
I remember what it felt like when physics, anatomy and scanning all seemed complicated at once. Once it started clicking, piece by piece, I knew I wanted to build the resource that helps other students get there faster than I did.
MHSc, RDMS (AB, OB/GYN), RVT
Founder, Tech Me Out
Tech Me Out is an independent education company.
Interactive Physics Companion™ is a trademark of Tech Me Out.