Radiology at Great Neck Dog and Cat Hospital

                  Contrast Radiology Studies

We spoke about chest radiographs in an earlier blog post, and I know you have all been waiting for another dose (radiology pun) of x ray knowledge.  Review the earlier post to refresh your memory on how radiographic images are made and here we go. 

Last time we were talking about chest films to evaluate the lungs and the heart.  A potentially more challenging use of radiology is to evaluate the function of the GI tract.  Now sometimes this is easy.  When we are looking for radio opaque foreign bodies (things your pet ate that it shouldn't have that will show up on an x ray film), or large tumors, or things like that, a radiograph is a quick and easy (not to mention relatively inexpensive) diagnostic tool.  Some day I'll post pictures of some of the things my patients have eaten, it will make for an interesting guessing game, but for now, lets talk barium.

If you recall, the image on an x ray film is made possible due to the different densities of the tissues that we are examining. The picture is frozen in time and does not tell us how things are moving relative to one another.  The problem is, the density of intestines and most of the normal intestinal contents is identical and the radiograph has a hard time distinguishing between what belongs there and what doesn't.

So, we can give a radio opaque substance (lets no x rays through and therefore is white on the film) to a patient and then take sequential films over time to see how it moves and what it outlines. 

 The first picture illustrates a number of points.  First, the white blob of barium is obvious in the middle of the abdomen.  The gender of this pet as well as the species is also obvious (any guesses to either question?).  The lungs and heart are visible on the left (just for your review).  There is also gas in the intestines and a trail of barium can be seen  streaking from the left of the big barium blob.  Got all that?

OK, lets move on. 

The second picture is an angry looking set of intestines.  You can see the air in the stomach, and in the loops of intestines.  In fact, most of the small intestines are filled with barium 45 minutes after the dog was given the contrast material.  That is pretty fast for it to be moving through like this, indicating (along with the gas) that there is something fishy going on here. 

The arrow in the next radiograph sort of gives things away, but I put that there when I was showing the film to the owner and it stayed.  Ah, the marvels of modern technology.

The second view follows.  The first is the pet on it's side, this one the pet is on the back (with no arrows).  But you can still probably appreciate the area where the barium is hung up on the foreign body in the lumen of the intestine.

This doggy presented for vomiting.  It went to surgery, and fortunately, the foreign body turned out to be plastic and we were able to push it the rest of the way into the colon and it passed (as they say) without further complication.  I really just wanted to use the pictures to illustrate how contrast medium can enhance our ability to use imaging to diagnose and formulate treatment plans for our patients.

Oh, almost forgot, last post I said that I was looking into an option for balancing your home prepared pet food recipes. Well, follow me on twitter @KNVET and you might gain some insight there.