Imaging

Diagnostic Imaging Service

When your pet isn’t feeling well, you just want to know what is wrong and how to fix it. Imaging can be an important tool for veterinarians to use to help figure out what is wrong. We have a variety of imaging options that are available including digital x-rays, ultrasound, and CT.

Digital x-rays allow us to take what most people think of as traditional x-rays. In the chest they are excellent for looking for evaluating the size of the heart, looking for free fluid or free air in the chest, and for looking for disease in the lungs (such as pneumonia, fluid from heart failure, fungal disease, cancer, etc). In the abdomen we often use x-rays to look for things that pets have eaten and see if there is a gas build up in the intestines or to evaluate the bladder for stones. We can also use x-rays for looking at bones to evaluate for fractures or evidence of other disease. But sometimes x-rays can’t give us enough detail and we need another imaging modality.

For example, if there is fluid in the abdomen we often can’t see the size of the organs with x-rays. Ultrasound, however, can be an excellent tool to let us evaluate the size of each of the abdominal organs and to look at the size and texture of the kidneys, liver, spleen, adrenal glands, and even the bladder or prostate. It can also be useful for evaluating the intestines if there isn’t a lot of gas present. Ultrasound can also be used to do more detailed evaluations of the heart (this is called an echocardiogram) or to look for pockets of free fluid under the skin or below layers of muscle. But sometimes there are situations where x-rays and ultrasound can’t give us the information we need and this is when we turn to CT scans.

CT scans, which is short for computerized tomography and is also known as a CAT scan, is a type of advanced imaging that gives us three dimensional x-ray images of the body. This type of scan requires a very specialized and expensive machine that is not found in many veterinary hospitals. It can be used to look inside the nasal passages and nasal sinuses where x-rays and ultrasound can’t penetrate well. It can also be used to evaluate the spinal cord where x-rays and ultrasound can’t penetrate well. CT can also perform more detailed imaging of the lungs if the required information can’t be seen on x-rays. CT scans are also used to evaluate the abdominal organs and sometimes are even used to evaluate how the blood flows through the abdominal organs (this requires that a contrast agent is given intravenously between studies). CT scans seem like they would take a long time, but the images are actually acquired over the course of just a few minutes. A CT scan is much faster than an MRI scan for example.