Ultrasound

Keauhou Veterinary Hospital is equipped with ultrasound in the radiology suite at our hospital. Our machine is equipped with 3 different probes enabling us to get the most accurate views available. It has digital color flow Doppler which measures blood flow in an area and DI-COM capabilities, which means we can send the images out to a Board Certified Radiologist when needed. This is added assurance that we are providing your pet with the best radiology service available on island. 

Our experienced doctors have additional training in imaging and you can rest assured that your pet is in good hands.Ultrasound is a relatively painless procedure and rarely requires anesthesia as it is none invasive. A sedative may be given prior to the procedure to help keep your pet calm. You pet will be shaved and the site prepped and cleaned prior to the procedure. This enables us to get the best and most accurate images of your pet. Ultrasound may be used in guiding the needle when a biopsy (sample) of an internal organ or fluid is necessary. The images produced can be printed, and recorded onto a tape or CD.

Hawaii also has a traveling Board Certified Radiologist that can come to our facility and perform the ultrasound should the need arise.

Ultrasound is cyclic sound pressure with a frequency greater than the upper limit of human hearing. Although this limit varies from person to person, it is approximately 20 kilohertz (20,000 hertz) in healthy, young adults and thus, 20 kHz serves as a useful lower limit in describing ultrasound. The production of ultrasound is used in many different fields, typically to penetrate a medium and measure the reflection signature or supply focused energy. The reflection signature can reveal details about the inner structure of the medium, a property also used by animals such as bats for hunting. The most well known application of ultrasound is its use in sonography to produce pictures of fetuses in the human womb. There are a vast number of other applications as well.^[1]

Medical sonography (ultrasonography) is an ultrasound-based diagnostic medical imaging technique used to visualize muscles, tendons, and many internal organs, to capture their size, structure and any pathological lesions with real time tomographic images. Ultrasound has been used by sonographers to image human and animal bodies for at least 50 years and has become one of the most widely used diagnostic tools in modern medicine. The technology is relatively inexpensive and portable, especially when compared with other techniques, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) andcomputed tomography (CT). Ultrasound is also used to visualize fetuses during routine and emergency prenatal care. Such diagnostic applications used during pregnancy are referred to as obstetric sonography.