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Using technology to improve animal care

Disease severity in animals can be very difficult to evaluate clinically.

Dr. Brad White is a veterinarian with Kansas State University’s Beef Cattle Institute.  “In an animal, for example, that I’ve treated a couple of times, and they seem to have maybe recovered a little, but they’re not back to full speed, how do I distinguish if that animal is on an upward trajectory, moving towards health,” he says.  “Or a downward spiral moving towards even less help.”

Dr. Louis Feitoza says that’s where technology, like the Butterfly Network’s handheld ultrasound, is making a difference in determining if an animal is recoverable or not. “When we are evaluating with the ultrasound, there are certain things that we can look at,” he says.  “When we did the research, those were highly associated with a negative outcome, and the negative outcome here would be the animal being culled from the herd or the animal dying within 60 days from the ultrasound.”

Dr. White says the technology also helps improve animal care. “It’s not just economics, right,” he says.  “If you’re watching an animal every day and you really want to take care of that animal and do the best for them, if they’re not going to recover and they’re going to suffer, then we have options that are available to us, including euthanasia, that will alleviate some of their suffering.”

Dr. David Rousseau with Butterfly Network says the technology has continued to evolve and is a smart fit for the cattle industry. “We’re able to collect the data and look at the data pretty readily based 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 able to access.”