Animal Health Trust, Newmarket
Animal Health Trust moves towards a film free environment and reaps the many benefits that this delivers
The Animal Health Trust is an independent charity located just outside Newmarket. Employing over 200 scientists, vets and support workers, it conducts research aimed at developing better means of preventing, diagnosing and treating diseases of animals.
One of its two busy clinics, the Centre for Small Animal Studies, is one of the largest multidisciplinary veterinary referral clinics in the UK
Up until recently, the AHT has been using films to view and diagnose the complex cases that are referred to them. As well as the storage issues that this raised, their 12 year old Agfa automatic processor was coming to the end of its effective life.
Ruth Dennis, Head of the Diagnostic Imaging Unit at the AHT led the search for a digital solution.
“Our choice at the time was either to install a new processor or to move into a digital environment. There were substantial benefits in using digital images and I knew that this was the right time for the Centre to take that step towards going filmless.”
Ruth turned to Susan Northwood, Visbion’s Veterinary Consultant for advice. Susan knew the AHT well and fully understood its needs. Visbion recommended its VPACS Enterprise System and Diagnostic Workstations to work alongside an Agfa CR system and thanks to the generosity of two sponsors, Mrs. Giselle Hampton and the trustees of the EBM Charitable Trust, the money was raised and the order placed.
The installation ran smoothly, with the team at Visbion on hand to help and advise. VPACS also now connects to the hospital’s existing MRI scanner and ultrasound, as well as providing expansion capability to connect a CT scanner in the future, and creates a single image archive across all devices. The archive is easily searchable, with convenient options for reviewing cases by date or patient identity.
All the vets and nursing staff can now view and manipulate patient images throughout the hospital. Visbion’s Image Web solution also allows quick and easy access to diagnostic quality images using a standard web browser on any networked PC.
Visbion’s Image Viewer Software allows diagnoses to be made by the team of 5 veterinary radiologists on high resolution diagnostic workstations.
Images from referring vets can also be imported and displayed on the dual diagnostic screens, allowing rapid and accurate reporting of these often complex cases.
Ruth Dennis, said, “The Visbion workstation displays images of extremely high resolution and is very user-friendly, even for people unfamiliar with digital image systems. It allows many post-processing functions to be carried out and image manipulation is easy. In particular, measurements (including the Norberg angle for hip scoring) can easily be performed.
The system is cleaner and easier to run than using an X-ray processor and wet chemicals, as well has having significant environmental benefits. It has great advantages for radiology rounds and teaching since images are available at the touch of a button and can be displayed well to a large group.
In the future we may also consider working with teleradiology, so that radiologists who are working off site can interpret the images, or examine them from home at unsocial hours. Likewise, since images are already digitised they can be downloaded into reports to referring vets, for use in papers and Powerpoint presentations, and for sending to other centres.”
Victoria Johnson, one of the AHT’s Senior Clinical Radiologists commented, “The transition from analogue to digital radiography has increased efficiency of our radiography service; saving time, money and archiving space since we no longer print films routinely”
With more office space now ready for the installation of another Workstation, the transition to a totally film free hospital at the AHT is almost complete.
More and more veterinary clinics of all sizes are making the change to digital imaging and Visbion VPACS is swiftly establishing itself as the product of choice amongst Veterinary professionals throughout the UK.
