New treatments and diagnostics work from the outside

Advances in veterinary medicine mean that your pet can get better treatment with less pain and invasiveness. Four recent developments offer effective and more benign methods of imaging organs and blood vessels and of treating or diagnosing cancer, urinary stones, and ophthalmological tumors and disease. Currently available mainly at the institutions that developed them, these technologies will filter down to referral hospitals in the next few years.

Ophthalmic ultrasound, working from the same basic principle as general ultrasound, ophthalmic ultrasound uses higher frequency probes to produce a detailed image of the eye's small structures. As a result, veterinarians can differentiate between tumors and cysts in the iris.

“This is important because a tumor needs to either be treated or the eye removed, while a cyst requires no treatment,”explains a veterinary ophthalmologist. “We can also more objectively monitor tumor size after treatment in cases where the eye is not removed, making it easier to treat tumors without removing the eye, so the animals can maintain vision longer.

Additionally, ophthalmic ultrasound yields accurate information on opaque corneal lesions, such as tumors, providing a better idea of the prognosis and the cost of surgical treatment. Plus, the smaller probe requires only topical anesthesia of the eye.

Contrast ultrasound, also under investigation at some faculties of veterinary medicine, contrast ultrasound produces images of minuscule bubbles injected into your pet using conventional ultrasound equipment. “Contrast ultrasound allows us to image blood, including blood in very small vessels, without the need for general anesthesia, radioactive substances, injection of iodine-containing drugs, or placement of needles into organs for certain diagnoses.” says a researcher for veterinary radiology.

The technology may help veterinarians differentiate between cancerous and benign nodules in the liver, diagnose portosystemic shunts, and identify any disease that may be accompanied by abnormal blood flow.

Extracorporeal shock-wave lithotripsy. Traditionally, urinary and kidney stones require surgical removal. However, researchers use extracorporeal shock-wave lithotripsy (ESWL) to break them up from outside the body instead.

Anestetized pets are placed over a soft cushion filled with water. Then shock waves, generated by an electrohydraulic or electromagnetic source, are transmitted through the cushion to the stones. The fragmented stones then pass harmlessly through the kidney and bladder, generally within several weeks. A two-night hospitalization follows the hour-long treatment.

Linear accelerators, a new type of radiation equipment, linear accelerators expand the types of cancerous tumors treatable by radiation. In the past, lower energy radiation machines effectively treated superficial tumors but did not penetrate as well to more deeply seated tumors In contrast, mid- to high-energy linear accelerators allow the use of different types of radiation (photons and electrons) to treat both deeper and superficial tumors. The two types of radiation also allow treatment of tumors overlying normal tissues, such as the lung and heart, without causing significant radiation damage to the tissue of those organs.