Equine Health Blog

Having had a large quanity of horses to image in the first 6 months of operating my thermal imaging camera, there is one thing that has become apparent to me….  the necessity for a qualified vet report of the thermal images.

Let me explain… what appears “hot” is not always where the problem is, hot areas can be caused by a number of issues, the most common is an overuse of the area.  For example, if a horse has an ongoing ligament injury they will favour that leg and instead use the opposite leg to carry all the weight.  The un-affected leg will show up hot on thermography as it is doing all the work, the affected leg wil be unusually cold but when you look further there will be a small amount of heat very localised pointing to the initial injury site.  To the untrained eye, all you will see is the hot leg and completely miss the initial injury site.  As you can see this will be very dangerous as you will commence treatment on the wrong leg.  

I have been asked by my clients asto why I do not produce a report myself, to me the only person that is able to report on any type of imaging is a vet.  That is why I work with Dr Donna Harper from the US who writes a fromal report on all my images, her experience both as a vet and having spent years imaging animals is invaluable.  The accuracy at which she has identified initial injury sites is amazing, and for the professionalisim of my business I will not be tempted into “guessing” where an injury is.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 17th, 2009 at 10:17 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.