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Sophia Campana
11-21-23
How AI Tools Change Veterinary Medicine

Artificial Intelligence has grown so much over the last few years and can now affect the

workforce by taking over certain jobs. According to ChatGPT 3.5 “Artificial intelligence, or AI,

refers to the development of computer systems that can perform tasks that typically require

human intelligence. These tasks include learning, reasoning, problem-solving, understanding

natural speech language, speech recognition, and visual perception. AI aims to create machines

or software that can mimic cognitive functions and adapt to different situations, ultimately

enhancing efficiency and decision-making processes.” As I am in college right now and thinking

of my future of wanting to graduate and become a veterinarian, I have started this research

project to see how AI is affecting this field. The research question I have formed for this paper is

How Artificial Intelligence has impacted the different fields of veterinary medicine for the

better? This research question took a long time to come up with and lots of research to help find

evidence to support it. There was a lot of information for the 3 different perspectives which I will

talk about later. In this paper, I will review radiology, equine medicine, and oncology as part of

veterinary medicine and explore how AI technology impacts them.

Through my research I found that Artificial Intelligence will not completely take over the

field of veterinary medicine as it would be a very difficult field for them to take over it will

definitely help to make the job easier and overall better. This field would be hard for Artificial

Intelligence to take over as they would have to make robots or some other form of AI that would

be physically able to look at the animals and diagnose them with whatever is wrong. This is not

impossible but would take a lot of time and work to try and train them to do this. This is why I

chose to show how AI can help this field.

Methodology
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Throughout my research, I have used a variety of different search engines including Google

Scholar and UCF Library to gather information on my topic and research question. The first

thing I had to do before I actually took the step into looking at these search engines was to

develop a research question so that I knew what I would be looking for on these search engines.

The first place I used was just searching on the regular internet using Google and found a few

sources there but none that were very good to use in the research paper. I then used Google

Scholar and UCF Library search engines to find more informative and better articles to support

my research paper. When using the UCF Library search engine, I used the database called

EBSCOhost to find the articles that I am using in this research paper. Some of the keywords I

used were Artificial Intelligence, Equine medicine, Veterinary oncology, veterinary radiology,

and veterinary medicine.

Results

Radiology

The first perspective I will be talking about in this paper is how Artificial Intelligence helped in

the field of veterinary radiology. Throughout my research, I found that AI actually makes the

lives of radiologists better and easier to do. “The machine can learn individual radiologist

preferences for organizing radiographs (individual hanging protocols) and relieve the

technologist and radiologist from the task. The result for the practitioner is a quicker, easier

workflow, and more accurate measurement results.” (Wilson 2022). Throughout this article, it

mentions several times about the lives of radiologists becoming easier based on the algorithms

that AI makes which can then lead to the help of rotating the images to correct positions and

even better measurements being made. “It will inspire collaboration between veterinary

radiology AI researchers, commercial AI platform developers, and practicing veterinarians to

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maximize the performance and clinical usefulness of AI for veterinary radiology, thereby

ensuring that optimal patient care remains the highest priority.” (Joslyn 2022 p.7) When working

in the veterinary field it is important that we put the care of patients first so the author says that it

will help improve the overall care of animals having Artificial Intelligence incorporated into the

radiology portion is a nice benefit to have. This will help me when I become a vet because I will

know that the algorithms can make it easier to read the radiographs and better help the patients I

will be looking after.

Equine Medicine

The second perspective is how AI helps in the veterinary field of equine medicine.

Through my research, I have found that it can help a lot with horses as this field is more

specialized and horses are one of the bigger animals that vets have to deal with. The two more

specific examples I found were how it helps with certain surgeries as well as helping make sure

that horses' eyes are okay and possibly diagnosing the horses with eye cancer. This information

can help anyone within the equine medicine field. “In this study, different Convolutional Neural

Network (CNN) models were evaluated in order to determine the CNN that detects uveitis in

equine eye pictures with the highest possible accuracy.” (May 2021). This article later gives

some results on this study and shows that with the help of Artificial Intelligence in the taking of

the pictures they were able to increase the odds of diagnosing uveitis by a large percentage. They

then made an app based on this study that veterinarians can take a picture of the horse's eye and

get an analysis and better picture within minutes of taking the picture. The other thing that equine

vets can do is use Artificial Intelligence algorithms to help predict if a horse is in need of surgery

for colic and the survivability of the horse if he undergoes surgery. “The machine learning

algorithms were able to predict the need for surgery and survivability likelihood of horses
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presented with acute abdomen (colic) with 76% and 85% accuracy, respectively. The application

of this technology in the different clinical fields of veterinary medicine appears to be of a value

and warrants further investigation and testing.” (Fraiwan 2020). With these increased odds it can

help to increase the odds that if a horse is in major need for surgery they will be put into surgery,

and we will know the survivability rate of that horse.

Oncology

Oncology is another specialty that is improved by the use of Artificial Intelligence. They

can use AI to help make cancer treatments easier for animals and could even lessen the side

effects that the animals will have as a result of the chemotherapy “Artificial intelligence in CT

simulation often focuses on reducing the dose to the patient while achieving baseline image

quality performance, or conversely, improving image quality for a fixed technique. In radiology,

the reduction of ionizing radiation and dose to the patient is prioritized to reduce the risk of

secondary cancers and allow for more frequent time point intervals of diagnosis and pathological

screening. (Leary 2022)” For oncology reducing the amount of radiation you put into the patient

can possibly lead to lesser of the side effects. When we do this in the above way, we could still

get good imaging because of Artificial Intelligence but then reduce the radiation we give, and the

patient can get the same results with less radiation put into the animal's body. “Identical

principles apply to the use of AI in radiation oncology where automated segmentation of organs-

at-risk and/or tumor/target volumes have the potential to increase speed/efficiency as well as the

potential to introduce medical errors that adversely impact treatment.” (Cohen 2022) With the

help of this, we could allow the animals to be more comfortable because it would take less time

to give the chemotherapy treatments. However, with this can come the fact that there could be
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adverse problems such as wrong doses given, or the doses being given too fast leading to

possible other problems.

Discussion

Throughout this paper, I have shown that Artificial Intelligence can be very beneficial to

the field of veterinary medicine and the select specialties in vet medicine. AI will be part of vet

offices across the country for diagnosis, radiology x-rays, and oncology treatment. With this AI

can simplify the process through algorithms and data when diagnosing an animal and can speed

up treatment plans. Specifically with radiology AI can take the certain pictures and measure the

different organs and pieces in an animal's body. They can also make the jobs of the radiologists

easier by rotating the images so they can be easier to read. In equine medicine, it can give you a

more accurate diagnosis of what is going on with the horses as they are such a specialized

animal. Finally, in oncology, it can make the side effects less for an animal and can make the

treatments faster and leave the animal more comfortable throughout their chemotherapy

treatments.

Works Cited

Chatgpt. ChatGPT. (n.d.). https://openai.com/chatgpt

Cohen, E. B., & Gordon, I. K. (2022). First, do no harm. Ethical and legal issues of artificial intelligence

and machine learning in veterinary radiology and radiation oncology. Veterinary Radiology &

Ultrasound, 63, 840-850.

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Fraiwan, M. A., & Abutarbush, S. M. (2020). Using artificial intelligence to predict survivability

likelihood and need for surgery in horses presented with acute abdomen (colic). Journal of

equine veterinary science, 90, 102973.

Joslyn, S., & Alexander, K. (2022). Evaluating artificial intelligence algorithms for use in

veterinary radiology. Veterinary Radiology & Ultrasound, 63, 871-879.

Leary, D., & Basran, P. S. (2022). The role of artificial intelligence in veterinary radiation

oncology. Veterinary Radiology & Ultrasound, 63, 903-912.

May, A., Gesell‐May, S., Müller, T., & Ertel, W. (2022). Artificial intelligence as a tool to aid in

the differentiation of equine ophthalmic diseases with an emphasis on equine uveitis. Equine

Veterinary Journal, 54(5), 847-855.

Wilson, D. U., Bailey, M. Q., & Craig, J. (2022). The role of artificial intelligence in clinical

imaging and workflows. Veterinary Radiology & Ultrasound, 63, 897-902.

Zuraw, A., & Aeffner, F. (2022). Whole-slide imaging, tissue image analysis, and artificial

intelligence in veterinary pathology: An updated introduction and review. Veterinary

Pathology, 59(1), 6-25