Grand Challenge Veterinary Imaging: Technology, Science, and Communication.

Abstract

Veterinary radiology is a long established subject discipline in veterinary science. It is fair to say that every veterinary graduate alive today will have received formal training in this subject irrespective of their date or place of graduation. Despite or perhaps because of this long ancestry, it is worthwhile examining the extent of the subject’s boundaries and its place in veterinary medicine. One can ask what imaging modalities fall under the remit of the subject and why they do so. Veterinary activities have always been concerned with the diagnosis and treatment of disease, with clinical and experimental animal research, and with agriculture, to select but a few areas of interest. How great a contribution can veterinary imaging make to these areas? The limits of what radiologists can and cannot do becomes unclear as the breakdown of traditional barriers between disciplines, considered essential to progress in medical education and scientific progress, continues (1). It has always been the case that the collection and use of image-related data are not the sole preserve of veterinary radiologists; uncertainties can exist as to who should be involved. The radiology community, both users and suppliers alike, has to ask what value imaging brings to collaborative work and how this value is best realized (2). If uncertainties are accepted, they can be seen to arise from a number of recognizable factors. Some are longstanding while others are quite new. Important factors relate to the wide range of veterinary involvement in biological sciences and the roles that veterinarians take on in society. As the profession’s sphere of involvement extends, so too do the frontiers that veterinary imaging reach. Also long a factor, but certainly an accelerating trend, is the arrival of new technologies, such as multi-slice imaging that generates data in quantities, orders of magnitude greater than their predecessors. A newer phenomenon is the rise of widely available Patient Archive and Communications Systems (PACS). These can separate the radiologist from the clinic, or to put it more positively, can allow non-centralized clinicians access to radiologists at central remote sites. Having to deal with new technologies has always been a feature of radiology. This is seen from its far past with the transition from saving images on glass plates to the use of emulsions mounted on celluloid, from manual to automated film processing and more recently, from two-dimensional imaging to three-dimensional multislice technologies that allow volumetric acquisitions. The last of these, which allows sub-millimeter image slices, have the same dimensions in three orthogonal planes. These isovolume voxels represent a massive amount of data and allow superior planar reconstructions which in turn demand new approaches to reading studies (3). Each transition represents an order of magnitude change and in each case the radiology imaging community has risen to the challenge. This article will trace some of these issues in the hope of seeing how they might be extrapolated into the future. We are all radiologists some of our working time and a very few of us are radiologists all of the time. It will benefit each individual along this spectrum of involvement, to have an awareness of each other’s presence. By looking at past changes and future prospects, we can better appreciate the subject that is veterinary imaging in all its manifestations.