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Research collaboration brings point-of-care-ultrasound to the feedlot

Bovine Respiratory Disease is the number one cause of mortality and morbidity in cattle worldwide and costs the U.S. cattle industry more than $1 billion annually. 

Dr. Brad White, director of the Beef Cattle Institute at Kansas State University, says research is being done to see how point-of-care ultrasound, or POCUS, can improve cattle diagnostics for diseases like BRD in a feedlot environment.

“The biggest challenge here is identifying which cattle are sick,” he says.  “We have effective treatments and those treatments are better when we give them early in the disease process. They’re also effective against certain types of organisms which, if we can identify those sick cattle, we have a better chance of being successful.”

He tells Brownfield that BRD can be difficult to diagnose, especially in a feedlot setting. “We have tried for years to get a methodology to improve our ability to identify sick cattle and place them into categories so we can understand what’s the likely outcome for this individual animal,” he says.

Dr. David Rousseau with Butterfly Network says using Butterfly iQ+ Vet in a feedlot setting allows veterinarians to bring lung point-of-care ultrasound chute-side. “It’s a multi-species, whole-body probe, and it can recreate the three traditional sound wave formats all in one device with a depth that goes up to 30 centimeters,” he says. “Creating multiple opportunities to use ultrasound where we could not use it before.”

He says the technology allows for the use of real-time data in the decision-making process to diagnose and manage BRD.