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Using technology to improve animal care
The severity of disease in animals can be very difficult to assess clinically.
Dr. Brad White is a veterinarian at the Beef Cattle Institute at Kansas State University. “In an animal, for example, that I’ve treated several times, and it seems to have maybe recovered a little bit, but it hasn’t come back to full speed, how can I distinguish if this animal is on a trajectory upward, toward health,” he says. “Or a downward spiral toward even less help.”
Dr. Louis Feitoza says this is where technology, like the Butterfly Network’s portable ultrasound, makes the difference in determining whether an animal is salvageable or not. “When we assess with ultrasound, we can look at certain things,” he says. “When we did the research, these were strongly associated with a negative result, and the negative result here would be the animal being removed from the herd or the animal dying within 60 days of the ultrasound.”
Dr. White says technology is also helping to improve animal care. “It’s not just about economics, is it,” he says. “If you watch over an animal every day and you really want to take care of that animal and do the best for them, if they don’t recover and they’re going to suffer, then we have options available. for us, including euthanasia, which will alleviate some of their suffering.
Dr. David Rousseau of Butterfly Network says the technology has continued to evolve and is ideally suited to the cattle industry. “We’re able to collect and review data quite easily depending on the platform,” he says. “Butterfly is a great ultrasound technology built on a great platform that makes it accessible and makes the data more usable and more accessible.”