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How Can Artificial Intelligence be Used in the Veterinary Field?

Introduction

As an aspiring veterinarian with experience in the field and plans to have a DVM in the next 8

years, I’ve asked myself the same question as all great scientists: How can I make my field more

efficient? Analyzing radiographs can be extremely time consuming and is not a perfect science. Not being

able to accurately diagnose from a radiograph can cause a delay in treatment and additional testing, which

can be extremely expensive for pet owners. At my exotic veterinary clinic, a radiograph costs $102.80. It

is also common for us to take multiple radiographs, and this can end up with five figure vet bills for pet

owners when all treatment is done. Pathology can also be extremely expensive for owners, and it is an

extremely inefficient process with many mistakes as slide analysis can be very straining on the human

eye. Diagnosis is another inefficient field, as it can be extremely difficult to diagnose specific conditions

to start proper medication as quickly as possible. So how can we fix these universal problems in the

veterinary community? We are now moving into a world centered around a new and inventive

technology: artificial intelligence. Fields such as software engineering, health care, data analytics,

cybersecurity and customer service are moving towards the use of artificial intelligence. One of the

biggest examples of artificial intelligence being used today is in the automobile industry, and it’s

expected that by 2030 around 80% of vehicles will be (somewhat) autonomous (FutureBridge). Through

my research, I have found that artificial intelligence shows a promising future for vastly improving the

efficiency of the veterinary field. With this massively growing innovative technology, it feels important

for scholars in any field to acknowledge the possibility of artificial intelligence being a tool that we may

work with regularly one day. These factors have led me to my personal research question: How can

artificial intelligence be used in the veterinary field? Through my research I have found that artificial

intelligence could be an incredible tool in pathology, radiology, and diagnosis.

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Radiology

Radiology could be one of the greatest uses for AI in healthcare. Radiology diagnosis is all based

on irregularities that are found due to the comparison of how a healthy animal would look on a

radiograph. For example, a common issue in bunnies is GI stasis due to a lack of a healthy diet, teeth

trimming, or dehydration. A huge concern in bunnies and in general for exotic veterinarians is the nature

of working on prey animals. Since bunnies are a hunted animal in the wild, they typically don’t show

sickness until it’s almost too late, and this leads exotic veterinarians to always work with a sense of

urgency as usually owners don’t notice issues in their pets until it’s almost too late. Having a resource that

could effectively and quickly offer suggestions for diagnosis could be vital in emergency situations. This

idea is not just an abstract idea, as there are promising studies showing that artificial intelligence models

can successfully identify problems in animal radiographs. An example of this was done in “Using

Machine Learning to Classify Image…” by Fintan J Mcevoy. This study was conducted in 2012 and

sought out to see if a partial least square discriminant analysis model (PLS-DA) and an artificial neural

network model (ANN) were capable of areas of interest on the canine pelvic joint. The study found that

the PLS-DA model was able to diagnose with a 0.067 classification error, and the ANN model had a

classification error of 0.089. The models also managed to find results in an average of 2.19 minutes per

radiograph, and these models have the potential to give great suggestions and help reduce human error.

Another diagnosis that artificial intelligence was able to pick up comparably to veterinary radiologists

was in the left ventricle in canines. Enlargement in this ventricle can cause congestive heart failure and

requires medication as soon as possible. The neural network was able to diagnose with an accuracy of

79.01%, very similar to the accuracy rates of veterinary radiologists, which was 82.71% (Li, Shen, et al).

The untapped potential of artificial intelligence in radiology is huge, and there’s a possibility of these

models being even more accurate than the human eye, as in “Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning in

Pathology”, Nobel peace prize winning scholar Stanley Cohen writes, “The analysis of an image can be
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more robust and provide more information than that which can be obtained by unaided morphological

interpretation by the human eye.” While this is just an observatory claim and has no backing, it still

shows the potential of how eventually with enough research these neural networks and ML models can

vastly benefit the way that veterinarians work now.

Pathology

Pathology is another field that could greatly benefit with the use of artificial intelligence. When

analyzing slides, pathologists spend hours looking through microscopes at slides. Fatigue and eye strain

can cause errors, and this leads to regulations that limit the overall efficiency of slide analysis. The New

York State Department of Health released a list of regulations for pathological screeners, and in these

regulations they limit screeners to not examine more than 80 slides in the span of 24 hours, at a minimum

of an 8 hour shift. These limitations are needed to reduce human error, but overall can be extremely

inefficient. ML-models, however, can help lower these limitations. An example of this was proven in an

experiment geared to see if neural networks were able to identify plasmodium gallinaceum (avian

malaria) in chicken feces. Overall, these neural networks were able to successfully identify this parasite

97% of the time, and the Darknet algorithm in specific was able to identify the parasite at a success rate of

99.2%. An experiment was conducted to see how AI was able to determine the spermatogenic stages of

rats, by analyzing slides from different ages of the testes. The algorithm managed to score an accuracy of

0.984, which is extremely comparable to the success rates of humans. A great experiment on artificial

intelligence in pathology was done by Christof A Bertram, where they sought out to see how a deep

learning model could help pathologists identify mitotic count in canine cutaneous mass cell tumors. What

makes this experiment so unique is the difficulty of identifying mitotic cells in tumors. False negatives are

very common, and the data found that a deep learning model can greatly increase pathologist’s ability to

identify these mitotic cells. Instead of utilizing the deep learning model to try and identify the mitotic

count alone as the prior 2 experiments have, this model was made to only identify cells that had the
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potential of being mitotic and highlight them for the pathologist to make the decision whether they were

mitotic or not. The experiment used 23 total pathologists to acquire the most accurate data, and the

interobserver correlation coefficient went from 0.70 without the aid of artificial intelligence to 0.92. False

negatives also went down 38% with the model identifying potential mitotic cells, and this data shows

huge potential for how artificial intelligence can help pathologists in the future.

Diagnosis

The last field that I plan to show the potential benefits of artificial intelligence in is diagnosis.

While I have shown how artificial intelligence can greatly improve in pathology and radiology fields,

diagnosis is by far a much more abstract concept. Diagnosis is very complicated in the veterinary field,

and it can get even more confusing when talking about exotic veterinarians. The main difference between

dog and cat veterinarians and exotic veterinarians is that there’s much more of an established standard

with dog and cat veterinarians as they only work on two species. The one benefit of the exotic veterinary

field is that there’s an extreme amount of writing and academic journal on cases, as we are responsible for

taking care of any pet that’s not a dog or cat. The issue with this is as an emergency veterinary technician,

I have found myself in emergency situations where time is of the essence and I have had to frantically

search through veterinary journals such as VIN or paperback books to try and find the best treatment for a

case, or in worse scenarios try to even understand the issue. My clinic recently saw a rare case of a blue

and gold macaw eating desert rose, a toxic houseplant. As far as I could find this has never happened

before, but we were lucky enough that the owners knew that the pet had eaten this plant and we were also

fortunate enough to reflect on a case of a dog eating the same toxic plant. A large neural network for

exotic veterinarians could help in cases like these, by raising red flags and showing potential diagnoses

based on symptoms. Neural networks are based on pattern recognition, and Sawon Bhattacharya defines

this as “a process of finding regularities and similarities in data using machine learning data. Now, these

similarities can be found based on statistical analysis, historical data, or the already gained knowledge by
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the machine itself.” This process would be extremely tedious, but as many veterinarians already rely on

other’s information, setting up a large neural network that would require the species and symptoms to

show potential diagnoses could help veterinarians get the second that they desperately need in many

cases. While a neural network could not solely diagnose alone, showing a list of potential diagnoses could

efficiently help veterinarians in the tedious diagnosis process which in turn can help clients pay less by

avoiding expensive testing such as gram stains, biopsies, and blood panels. Another great way that

machine learning could help in the veterinary field is giving a survivability likelihood for surgeries. A

large issue for pet owners and veterinarians alike is the moral dilemma for invasive surgeries. Surgeries

are expensive for owners and can bring up questions such as if it’s necessary or if it will improve your

pet’s quality of life, meaning an algorithm that could give percentages on success rates could help make

these decisions a little easier. An example of this was done to predict the survivability likelihood on

horses with colic, a very common ailment in horses. The algorithm was given classification features to

give it a better gauge on the situation, and these factors were age, sex, duration, history, heart rate, rectal

exam, and abdominocentesis. The algorithm would then give percentages on if they would need surgery,

and the survivability likelihood of said surgery. Another experiment conducted by multiple Israeli

Veterinarians titled “A Pilot Study for a non-invasive system for detection of malignancy in canine

subcutaneous and cutaneous masses using machine learning” shows a different and exciting potential with

artificial intelligence models. Cancer is the leading killer for dogs over the age of 10, and the only way to

truly know if masses contain cancerous cells are by biopsy. Biopsies are very invasive, and most clinics

are not able to do the testing on their own which requires sending to external labs which can be very time

consuming and expensive. This model was formed to see if they could successfully identify cancerous

tumors without a biopsy, using an in-house testing strategy called the HT-Vista system, which measures

heat diffusion rates in the tissue. To test accuracy, all masses were later biopsied to compare results. This

model was able to successfully diagnose 62 out of the 67 masses. Although this data isn’t perfect it still

shows that with the right resources, these models could be extremely efficient and accurate.
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Discussion

Overall, this evidence proves a huge potential in artificial intelligence in the veterinary field for

the future. Two large constraints that the veterinary community faces currently in the implementation of

these models are the financial burden and investment of time that is required to make this possible. While

there is research being done currently, it’s not hugely widespread and many of these ideas are simply

abstract concepts with no real backing from major corporations in the veterinary business. One factor that

leads to optimism for the implementation of AI in these fields is the human healthcare system. As the

human healthcare system is much larger and receives more funding, it seems that similar models will

soon be put into place in these fields. This could cause a trickle-down effect, and veterinary pathologists

and radiologists especially will most likely follow the systems that were created initially for humans.

These fields are very similar, and the models would work in the same fashion but with different data

meaning the jump wouldn’t be incredibly difficult. Another factor that could potentially make this process

happen sooner is how the veterinary world is getting increasingly more corporate. Corporations such as

Mars, Banfield, and VCA are buying out many smaller privately owned clinics, and this could lead to a

corporate level of communication which could result in more money being invested into research on

artificial intelligence as many clinics would be able to benefit from this investment.

Through my own personal experience and through my research process, I have found the grounds

to reasonably call for more funding and time investment into the implementation of artificial intelligence

in the veterinary field. As I’ve mentioned in the discussion portion, the largest issue that this technology

faces is the vast amount of resources that are needed in order to make these technologies a possibility.

This is the entire reason for this research paper. Artificial intelligence has too much potential to not invest

for the future of the veterinary world, and the first step to making this abstract idea a real possibility is to

show veterinarians the true benefits.

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Works Cited

“Artificial Intelligence Reshaping the Automotive Industry.” FutureBridge, 22 Sept. 2022,

https://www.futurebridge.com/industry/perspectives-mobility/artificial-intelligence-

reshaping-the-automotive-industry/.

Bertram, Christof A., et al. “Computer-Assisted Mitotic Count Using a Deep Learning–Based

Algorithm Improves Interobserver Reproducibility and Accuracy.” Veterinary Pathology,

vol. 59, no. 2, 2021, pp. 211–226., https://doi.org/10.1177/03009858211067478.

Bhattacharya, Sawon. “An Overview of Neural Approach on Pattern Recognition.” Analytics

Vidhya, 18 Dec. 2020, https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2020/12/an-overview-of-

neural-approach-on-pattern-recognition/.

Cohen, Stanley. Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning in Pathology, Elsevier, Amsterdam,

2021.

Dank, Gillian, et al. “A Pilot Study for a Non-Invasive System for Detection of Malignancy in

Canine Subcutaneous and Cutaneous Masses Using Machine Learning.” Frontiers in

Veterinary Science, vol. 10, 26 Jan. 2023, https://doi.org/10.3389/fvets.2023.1109188.

Fraiwan, Mohammad A., and Sameeh M. Abutarbush. “Using Artificial Intelligence to Predict

Survivability Likelihood and Need for Surgery in Horses Presented with Acute Abdomen
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(Colic).” Journal of Equine Veterinary Science, vol. 90, 19 Mar. 2020, p. 102973.,

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jevs.2020.102973.

Kittichai, Veerayuth, et al. “Classification for Avian Malaria Parasite Plasmodium Gallinaceum

Blood Stages by Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks.” Scientific Reports, vol. 11,

no. 1, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-96475-5.

“Laboratory Reporting and Specimen Submission Requirements for Cytopathology.”

Wadsworth, 2020, https://www.wadsworth.org/sites/default/files/WebDoc/CDRG

%20NYState%202020_101920%202.pdf.

Li, Shen, et al. “Pilot Study: Application of Artificial Intelligence for Detecting Left Atrial

Enlargement on Canine Thoracic Radiographs.” Veterinary Radiology & Ultrasound, vol.

61, no. 6, 2020, pp. 611–618., https://doi.org/10.1111/vru.12901.

McEvoy, Fintan J., and José M. Amigo. “Using Machine Learning to Classify Image Features

from Canine Pelvic Radiographs: Evaluation of Partial Least Squares Discriminant

Analysis and Artificial Neural Network Models.” Veterinary Radiology & Ultrasound, vol.

54, no. 2, 2012, pp. 122–126., https://doi.org/10.1111/vru.12003.

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