Special to Northwest Horse Source
Written by Ron Colton, DVM, Evergreen Equine Veterinary Practice, Snohomish, Wash.

Today’s Vet Tech Tools Mean Rapid Response for Horse Care
Imagine you find your horse with a nail in his foot. You call your veterinarian. She is on the way and has told you to leave the nail in place. She wants to take an x-ray to determine the exact location of the nail and whether it has damaged any vital structures. Only then will she remove the nail and begin therapy. It’s 1999, so she will have to drive back to the clinic to develop and review the films, which hopefully are of good quality, and then drive back your farm to provide care. Cross your fingers traffic isn’t bad.

Fast forward to the same scenario today. Your vet arrives with portable digital x-ray equipment and is able to see the image of your horse’s foot and the nail in a matter of seconds. If a second opinion is needed, the images are sent directly from the x-ray system to a hospital via a wireless Internet card. Important information is acquired and analyzed quickly. Treatment is started in minutes instead of hours, with no risk of traffic delays. This is just one of many newer technologies that have brought considerable advantages to equine medicine.

Diagnosis: Rapid Response
Advances that have changed many aspects of our lives—such as the speed of information delivery—are also revolutionizing horse care through new technology and equipment development. While some newer medical devises are limited to hospital use, a lot of advanced equipment today is portable. Now veterinarians making farm and barn calls are much more equipped to handle sophisticated and complicated problems that would before have been referred to a vet hospital. All of the latest portable modalities improve not only the accuracy and speed of diagnosis and care, but also the prognosis of a successful therapeutic outcome.

We all talk about what helped get our horses healthy after a problem has occurred. Yet while therapy is the ‘glamorous’ part of equine care, accurate diagnosis is the key to achieving that therapy’s success. The most important area technology has contributed to equine care is the development of diagnostic equipment that provides more detailed information as well as the ability to share or transmit that information easily with other veterinarians. Let’s look at some of these latest advancements and how they work:

Digital Technology
Digital imaging is particularly useful to diagnose tendon, ligament and joint injuries. Most often, images are captured either through digital radiography (x-rays) and/or ultrasonography (ultrasound), both of which can be enhanced, edited, and shared in a manner similar to pictures taken with a digital camera. In the case of digital x-ray, the images are instant, allowing the veterinarian to retake a poor quality image if needed and discuss a diagnosis and therapeutic plan with the owner right away. The owner will see the nail in the hoof bed at the same time as the veterinarian and get educated about the injury. The horse will get immediate treatment.


Today’s small, portable laptop-based digital ultrasound machines have most of the tech features of larger shopping-cart sized ones. Many tissue injuries that were not possible to diagnose without going to a hospital just a few years ago are now able to be identified because of the high resolution (detail) images of these portable ultrasound units.


Digital imaging systems can also play a role in therapy; real-time information can assist in the precise placement of injections or orthopedic procedures such as fracture repair.


High-end imaging such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), nuclear scintigraphy (bone scan for diagnosing acute and chronic lameness), and Computerized Tomography (CT scan for lameness and neurologic disorders) are available at highly specialized referral centers. MRI is especially useful in providing a precise diagnosis of soft tissue or bone problems that cannot be determined with either x-ray or ultrasound imaging. Here in the Pacific Northwest, the MRI program at Washington State University College of Veterinary Medicine, under the guidance of Dr. Robert Schneider, is one of the first to apply this technology to horses. At present, MRI is restricted to certain parts of the horse (lower limbs and some regions of the head and neck) based on what will fit into the magnet. Nuclear scintigraphy is particularly useful in identifying a region or regions involved in complicated or multiple limb lameness. Because a bone scan usually does not give a specific diagnosis, additional imaging with x-ray or ultrasound may be employed once the injured area is identified.


Gait analysis equipment that provides information about how a horse is using or weighting its limbs is a more recent arrival to the diagnostic scene. Presently, most of these systems involve a small mat or track that measures foot pressure as a horse moves over it. Other approaches being developed use Blue-tooth enabled WIFI transmitters strategically placed on a horse to send data to a laptop computer for analysis of the horse’s movement.

Mainstream Technology Has Useful Shelf Life
Even with all these leading edge tools, vets still rely on equipment that has been around for years. Take, for instance, intra oral viewing equipment. This uses a small, flexible fiber optic cable connected to a hand-held monitor to provide close-up views of the structures inside a horse’s mouth. Problems that would be difficult or impossible to see by just looking in the mouth can be view by the veterinarian and easily shown to the horse owner or saved as a media file to place in the animal’s record. Standard home video cameras are used to allow slow motion evaluation of a horse’s gait. Video clips can be saved or easily emailed for a second opinion.

Therapy Tech
Advanced equipment is not limited to diagnostics alone. Most of the new technologies for therapy are aimed at improving outcomes for performance problems, particularly lameness. Extra corporeal shockwave therapy (Shockwave) was originally used for treating kidney stones in humans. As this equipment got smaller and more durable, it became barn friendly making it more readily available to a majority horse owners.

Overall, Shockwave therapy has been successfully used to manage ligament and tendon injuries, as well as treat some bone conditions such as chronic arthritis. Recent research also shows promise for Shockwave as an aid to wound healing. In brief, this procedure delivers pulses of high-energy waves to the damaged tissue. Though it is not known how shockwave works exactly, theoretically it stimulates the growth of new blood vessels and the movement of healing cells into the affected area.

Cool, Cooler, Coolest
When it comes to cooling out an injury, cold water is good, ice is better, but portable cryotherapy (cold delivering) equipment is the best. These systems, such as Game Ready Equine, circulate ice-cold water through form-fitting wraps that alternate variable levels of active compression cycles. Cooling a hot or swollen limb does more than just make a swollen leg look less big. It calms the swelling in combination with giving active compression and release, a procedure shown to reduce toxin build up and improve healing.

The Next Generation
The exciting news is that while most horse owners are unlikely to need all of the most complicated and sophisticated medical technologies in use today, when a specific problem arises, veterinarians who make farm calls have a mobile tech tool chest that greatly exceeds anything available even five years ago. The latest technologies are rapidly advancing a whole range of new applications, such diagnosing specific infectious or genetic conditions, determining pregnancy earlier than is currently possible, and providing more accurate and less invasive means to evaluate and treat a wide range of injuries to horses. Something as seemingly simple as a nail in the foot, which can be complicated, is no longer an hours-long high-stress crisis. The less suffering for a horse, the less stress for the owner. And the final prognosis? It’s only going to get better and better.

Byline: Ron Colton, DVM, is a principal veterinarian at Evergreen Equine Veterinary Practice, Snohomish, Wash. His specialty interests include lameness, ultrasound, and internal medicine.

Biographical Sketch:
Dr. Ron Colton received a degree in Pharmacy before receiving his doctorate in Veterinary Medicine in 1987. Both of his degrees were earned at Oregon State University. In 1988, Dr. Colton completed a one-year internship focused on equine medicine and surgery at Texas A&M University, College of Veterinary Medicine. He then practiced at Equine Services Surgical and Referral Center in Louisville, Kentucky for three years, before returning to the Northwest. Dr. Colton and Dr. Howell merged their individual practices to form Evergreen Equine Veterinary Practice in 1998. His specialty interests include lameness, ultrasound, and internal medicine. He lives in Woodinville with his wife, Debbie, their dog, Twice, and their three horses.