You stare blankly at a nearly indiscernible abnormality in your horse’s fetlock X ray as your veterinarian puts the film on a light box. He points at a bone chip, but all you see is the glaring white form of your horse’s bone. All too often this is the scenario when a veterinarian is communicating a diagnosis to a horse owner. You think, “there has to be a better way,” and now there is–with the growing availability of digital radiography, which is commonly called Computerized Radiography (CR).

Instead of capturing images on cassettes and having to develop the film in chemicals, CR systems capture information digitally on special plates using a regular X ray camera. The plates only save the image for a short time, and must be passed through a processor to permanently store the image in a computer. Since the image degrades 50% in an hour, the system is better for a clinical setting than an ambulatory practice.

Practitioners read radiographs daily, if not hourly, and very slight abnormalities are easy for them to spot and understand. CR is becoming more common in veterinary clinics around the country, and Rood and Riddle Equine Hospital of Lexington, Ky., is the first private equine clinic to obtain the technology. Other equine operations that have CR systems are Colorado State University, the Marion duPont Scott Equine Medical Center (Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine), and the Universities of Georgia and Florida.

Rood and Riddle installed the Fuji FCR 5000 in April of 1999, according to Alan J. Ruggles, DVM, Dipl. ACVS, who uses the technology in at least 90% of his radiographic examinations. He says that the other vets at the clinic take advantage of the improved imaging, and use the equipment as well