Get access to all handy features included in the IVIS website
- Get unlimited access to books, proceedings and journals.
- Get access to a global catalogue of meetings, on-site and online courses, webinars and educational videos.
- Bookmark your favorite articles in My Library for future reading.
- Save future meetings and courses in My Calendar and My e-Learning.
- Ask authors questions and read what others have to say.
Radiography in the Diagnosis of Lameness
Get access to all handy features included in the IVIS website
- Get unlimited access to books, proceedings and journals.
- Get access to a global catalogue of meetings, on-site and online courses, webinars and educational videos.
- Bookmark your favorite articles in My Library for future reading.
- Save future meetings and courses in My Calendar and My e-Learning.
- Ask authors questions and read what others have to say.
Read
Radiography and ultrasound are very important and relatively cheap imaging procedures compared to gamma-scintigraphy and MRI.
For this reason radiography has and will be the preferred first line imaging tool in diagnosing and localizing disease processes in lame horses and assessing bone and joints for surgical interventions.
On the other hand horse owners should be informed that radiography is also limited in his capacity of imaging the underlying lesions. Many horse owners still think that radiography will demonstrate more than bone lesions and they believe that cartilage, ligament, joint capsule and tendon lesions can be imaged. It is our duty to explain to the horse owner that radiography is not the “crystal ball” giving us all the information of what is going on in the horse’s body. Simplistically said, “radiography is used to demonstrate bone lesions and nothing more”. If we want to visualise subtle bone and subchondral changes, cartilage damage, ligament and tendon problems other imaging modalities such as gamma-scintigraphy, CT, MRI and ultrasound are needed.
Gas, fat, foreign bodies and the contour of soft tissue can also be visualised with radiography.
Before starting to use radiography in an equine lameness examination, a good diagnostic lameness work up is needed using intra-articular and perineural anaesthesia. This is the only objective way to pinpoint a pain area, which than can be further examined in depth with radiography, US, MRI, CT and/or gamma-scintigraphy.
An experienced lameness examiner can have the “feeling” that the horse is lame from the stifle, fetlock or proximal suspensory ligament but he/she will always use “perineural or intra- articular blocks” to objectively confirm this feeling.
Radiographic screening of the entire limb or several limbs is sometimes indicated if the lameness is not consistent or too subtle to be “blocked”. [...]
Get access to all handy features included in the IVIS website
- Get unlimited access to books, proceedings and journals.
- Get access to a global catalogue of meetings, on-site and online courses, webinars and educational videos.
- Bookmark your favorite articles in My Library for future reading.
- Save future meetings and courses in My Calendar and My e-Learning.
- Ask authors questions and read what others have to say.
Comments (0)
Ask the author
0 comments