HOW DIGITAL CYTOLOGY IS CHANGING THE GAME FOR HEMATOLOGY THIS SPONSORED, EDUCATIONAL CONTENT IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY SCOPIOVET
KEY HIGHLIGHTS
The landscape of veterinary medicine is ever changing – and that’s a good thing. In a blink, yesterday’s best practices are outdated, propelling once cutting edge technologies and techniques into the equivalent of a flip phone. No offense to the flip phone – it was a marvel to behold when it was first introduced. Little did we know, the iphone was right around the corner. Veterinarians and pathologists are a resourceful and gritty bunch. In the absence of the ideal methods, they’ve been able to “get by” with the rudimentary if not limited tools at their disposal. And innovations that fill gaps in an elegant and easy way – become the new standard of care. A good measure of the importance of an innovation is when it becomes a tool you can’t live without. Take for example the CBC analyzer. This game changing innovation is now widely recognized as the gold standard for blood analysis. Today, it would be highly unusual to find a veterinary practice performing a blood analysis using a hemocytometer, but we forget it was the gold standard only a few decades ago. 1 WHERE THERE’S A GAP, THERE’S POTENTIAL TO INNOVATE The CBC analyzer allows blood studies to be performed rapidly, bringing critical insights to the point of care in both urgent and non-urgent cases. It
is a fast, low cost tool that helps the savvy veterinarian get to the heart of the matter quickly, so they can solve the patient’s problem in the most efficient way. While the CBC analyzer is powerful for all these reasons and more, it does have its limitations, necessitating the review of the morphology of the peripheral blood smear from time to time. In vet school, students are told to review a blood smear every time a CBC is run, but this is not always realistic (sorry, teach). Because blood smear review requires some expertise, when there isn’t a clinical pathologist down the hall, you have to choose either to; 1) read it yourself and try
to decipher an answer immediately; 2) send it out to the reference lab so a pathologist can take a look, thus rendering the CBC already performed useless while forcing a multi-day delay (you were so close!); or 3) do without the blood smear review, opting instead to treat empirically or based on intuition. Sadly, option 2 is often not relevant if the answer can’t wait. Therefore, unless you have a specific interest and skill in blood morphology – meaning option 1 is ok for you, option 3 is the most frequently relied upon approach. None of the options are ideal. Indeed – a situation ripe for
innovation! (continued)
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