With doting parents-to-be willing to pay up to £250 for images of their unborn children, baby scans have suddenly become big business.

Conventional pregnancy scans, the standard option for offered to most NHS patients, are static images taken with a two-dimensional (2-D) scan. Parents take home a grainy black-and-white photograph. At the moment mums-to-be have NHS ultra-sound scans at 12 and 20 weeks to check that the foetus is healthy. These new moving 4-D images are performed at 24 to 30 weeks and can be downloaded onto an iPod, e-mailed to friends or even used as a screensaver. Dr Panday has recently opened a new scanning unit at The Portland Hospital in London, “with 4-D scanning, the image is in real time and you can show parents moving images of the expression on their baby’s face”.

The technology company Philips has just released a cutting edge vision of how pregnancy scans might look in the next three to five years. Both parents will sit on a comfortable double seat and a fabric belt is wrapped round the pregnant belly. This projects real time sound and vision from the womb on to a giant rounded tummy-shaped screen on the wall. This is still a concept theory but is predicted to become reality within three to five years.