Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
by Dr Diana Barker, Evervet Prahran, VIC
We’ve owned this CT scanner for five years and use it about twice a week. We converted our old dark room to accommodate the scanner and it fits in very nicely.
What’s good about it
It gives us the ability to utilise advanced imaging. It’s particularly useful for diagnosing cancers, looking at nasal masses, and investigating lameness in the limbs. It has increased our capacity to diagnose a variety of conditions in our local GP clinic.
The unit is a miniature version of a human CT unit with a doughnut-shaped scanner that rotates X-rays around the body. The images it produces are detailed and high quality. We send the images through to a telemedicine site to have them interpreted by a tele-radiologist. The results are back at the clinic within 24 hours. For urgent cases, we can request a fast report that will arrive within four hours.
While it’s mainly used to look for growths, it’s very good at skeletal problems. We can look at limbs, spines and discs to find the sources of lameness issues. It’s not as comprehensive as an MRI but MRIs are few and far between. It’s important that there is no movement from the animal during scanning so sedation or anaesthesia is needed.
What’s not so good
There’s quite a steep learning curve for the people on our team who wish to use the scanner. We also had to increase our radiation management plan to incorporate the CT. The size of the unit means it can only scan dogs up to 50 kilos.
