Keeneland first to offer digital technology for reviewing pre-sale digital radiography exams involving thousands of horses

The Keeneland Thoroughbred breeding stock auction held November in Lexington, Ky., marked the first time digital images of radiographs were available for review and archiving. Eklin Digital put equipment and and servers in place so veterinarians representing sellers could archive the images electronically, and veterinarians representing buyers could bring up the images through a secure server.

In years past, the 32 X ray images per horse required massive storage capacity at the sales grounds, since more than 4,700 horses are catalogued for some of the sales. The retrieval and viewing of those X rays were cumbersome processes, and only one veterinarian at a time could view the images, sometimes causing a backlog. With digital radiography (DR) images, storage, and retrieval, the images can be called up securely by more than one veterinarian at a time, adjusted for brightness, and magnified to look at particular areas of interest.

“During the auction’s two week duration, the logistics of accommodating almost 200 veterinarians reviewing sets of 32 images per horse for approximately 4,700 horses were massive,” said Cathy Schenck, Keeneland’s repository supervisor, as noted in a press release from Eklin. “With only one set of films available per horse, imagine scores of veterinarians standing in line waiting to analyze images on some of the more popular horses. Needless to say, it can get quite hectic at times.”
 
For Keeneland, this service easily amounts to hundreds of thousands of films to be reviewed at each auction. For example, at this year’s September yearling sale, the 4,700 sets of pre-sale images were reviewed an average of 3.4 times per set, amounting to the actual physical handling of more than half a million X ray films