To improve the health and welfare of the horse, to further the professional development of its members, and to provide resources and leadership for the benefit of the equine industry. Lameness diagnosis can be very frustrating when the source of pain is located in the upper leg and is not associated with a synovial structure, or the lameness is too subtle to utilize diagnostic analgesic injections, or the patient is not amenable to these injections, or the lameness is difficult to eliminate by local analgesic injection. These cases usually require the practitioner to treat the horse symptomatically or to perform other diagnostic techniques to try and determine possible areas of injury.
Thermography is one such technique.
It is the pictorial representation of the surface temperature of an object. It is a non-invasive technique that measures emitted heat. A medical thermogram represents the surface temperatures of skin, making thermography useful for the detection of inflammation. Although thermographic images measure only skin temperature, they also reflect alterations in the circulation of deeper tissues. This ability to assess inflammatory change non-invasively makes thermography an ideal imaging tool to aid in the diagnosis of certain lameness conditions in the horse.