Companion Animal Diagnostic Care
Digital Radiography
Over the past few years veterinary X-rays have become far more powerful and useful than ever before, principally because they can now be taken digitally and displayed on a computer. This means that your veterinarian can quickly take a highly detailed image and then manipulate it to gain a better view of your pet's bones and internal organs. The result is that diagnosing a very wide range of medical conditions is made faster and far more accurate than ever before.
Because the Troy & Wentzville Veterinary Clinics believe that our clients deserve the best possible care, we have a state-of-the-art digital veterinary X-ray machine. For complex cases, we are able to easily share these images with a board-certified radiologist.
The Advantages of Digital Veterinary X-Rays
- Digital X-rays can be saved to a disk and given to you as part of your pet's home medical record.
- Images can be shared quickly via email to specialists when a second opinion or additional diagnosis is needed.
- Your pet's time on the X-ray table is reduced because fewer images need to be taken.
- Digital X-rays eliminate the need to use toxic chemicals in the film development process, decreasing the risk of exposure to our staff and the environment.
Veterinary Ultrasound
Ultrasound is a pain-free, totally non-invasive technique that uses high-frequency sound waves to produce a real-time image of your pet's internal organs. Often considered more exact than radiographs, ultrasound provides a movie of what is happening inside your pet's body.
It is particularly useful in viewing your pet's abdominal organs including the spleen, kidneys, liver, and gallbladder, and for seeing other areas such as the thyroid glands, testicles and mammary glands. It can also be used to evaluate heart functions, and for performing bladder scans.
Ultrasound works well in conjunction with other diagnostic tools and a wide range of diagnostic procedures. For example, if an X-ray shows a lesion on your pet, an ultrasound can determine the origin of the lesion and whether it has spread elsewhere in your pet's body. Using the ultrasound image as a guide, surgical biopsies can be obtained without major surgery and your pet can often go home the same day. Ultrasounds are typically not stressful for your pet and take anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes to perform.
The Troy & Wentzville Veterinary Clinics use state-of-the-art ultrasound technologies and are up-to-date on ultrasound-assisted procedures.
Our Lab
Performing preventative medicine as well as diagnosing emergent internal health issues requires the ability to perform a wide range of laboratory tests on blood, urine, feces, and biopsied tissue. Without timely access to precise laboratory test results it is difficult to make an accurate diagnosis or assessment of your pet's health.
At the Troy & Wentzville Veterinary Clinics we have invested quite a bit in updating and maintaining our complete in-house laboratories. Each laboratory allows us to perform urinalysis, parasite identification, fungal cultures, blood chemistry testing, and more. In some cases, we can receive results within minutes. We also use our labs to properly evaluate every surgical case prior to the administration of anesthesia.