Imagine a veterinarian studying your pet’s individual health history over their entire lifetime, rather than generically placing a pet into a general breed or age group to analyze their state of health. At West Chelsea Veterinary, this kind of highly customized veterinary medicine is a reality right now thanks to state-of-the-art technologies and the complete dedication of our expert veterinary team.

These advances allow for human-grade health diagnostics in the form of comprehensive blood tracking, urinalysis, ultrasounds, digital radiography, and echocardiograms for pets. After all, every pet’s medical health and history is unique. Therefore, we believe their ongoing medical care should also be assessed on an individual basis.

Pets cannot verbalize how they feel physically. Pet parents can only watch for anything outside of the norm. Blood testing and other diagnostic tools can help to reveal early signs of illness, many times before your pet even appears to feel unwell. Diagnosing and treating pets early on can mean better outcomes and dramatically lower potential treatment costs.

Consistent Diagnostic Care

Our Advice: Be proactive about having annual blood work analyzed. It is important. Our advanced technologies make this process simpler, more comfortable, and faster than ever before. Whether you visit West Chelsea Veterinary with an ill pet, a senior pet, or a healthy pet in any stage of life, you can rest assured that our diagnostic capabilities can tell us a clear story about your pet’s overall health from head-to-toe.

It’s the combination of a thorough hands-on examination of your pet and the accurate interpretation of their diagnostic data that enables us to make a proper diagnosis. This requires experience, care, and thoroughness, which you can always expect from the team at West Chelsea Veterinary.

First developed to track submarines during World War I, ultrasound technology has long been used to diagnose disease and monitor fetal growth in human patients. Since the early 1980s, the diagnostic tool has been widely used in veterinary medicine and is one of the high-quality medical services we offer at West Chelsea Veterinary.

Ultrasound

Ultrasounds have become an essential tool in small animal veterinary practices. This technology offers a non-invasive diagnostic method that allows us to detect illnesses early and provide better outcomes overall and a more precise prognosis for our patients.

Sound Waves Enable Real-Time Results

Ultrasonography works by emitting high-frequency sound waves through an ultrasound transducer, an electronic device that transforms energy from one type to another. The sound waves bounce off internal organs or tissues to make echoes, which are then picked up by the transducer and displayed as an image on an attached video monitor.

Ultrasonography is extremely useful in the examination process because images are captured and displayed in real-time, allowing our ultrasonographers to view both the structure and movement of internal organs to get a much clearer sense of the issue under examination.

Ultrasound is Key to Emergency Care

A typical examination will often require no tranquilization or anesthesia. Ultrasounds are easily performed on small animals with little to no added stress or trauma as well. A quick shave of the area to be scanned and a small dab of gel is generally all that’s needed to get an ultrasound underway, meaning this diagnostic tool is especially useful in emergencies. In critical care situations, ultrasounds are often our first step as they can provide a significant amount of diagnostic information very quickly.

Technology First Line of Defense in Pet Care

In addition to acute care, we use ultrasounds in a myriad of scenarios at West Chelsea Veterinary. Ultrasounds are used to evaluate your pet’s abdominal organs, such as the stomach and intestines, liver, gall bladder, spleen, kidneys, and pancreas, to name a few. Ultrasounds specifically work well to detect internal abnormalities such as nodules, masses, cysts, and abscesses, and are used in combination with other procedures for diagnostic purposes.

Ultrasonography is also an excellent tool in caring for senior pets. As pets age, they can begin to show symptoms of the types of illnesses associated with old age such as cancer, kidney disease, Cushing’s disease, and heart disease. Ultrasounds help detect disorders at an early stage, making it easier to provide proactive rather than reactive treatment to help improve your pet’s quality of life.

Echocardiograms

An echocardiogram (or echo) is a heart ultrasound. This treatment is one of the least invasive and most effective ways to examine the heart’s architecture and see how it functions in real-time. If your pet has a heart murmur, we will most likely arrange an echo.

The heart is divided into four chambers, each with a valve separating them. To keep blood flowing in the appropriate direction, these valves seal at the right time. We can see if the walls of the heart are thickened if the chambers of the heart are enlarged and if the heart valves are functioning properly via echocardiography. We can also check to see if the blood pressure in the veins that lead to and from the heart is normal.

Echocardiography uses sound waves to painlessly:

• Image the heart valves
• Assess blood flow
• Determine what is causing a heart murmur
• Measure the strength and health of the heart muscle and chambers

This is a valuable test that will allow your pet’s veterinarian to diagnose heart diseases and make recommendations to you for the right treatment regimen. At West Chelsea Veterinary, we have a board-certified radiologist and cardiologist who is at our facility once per week to perform ultrasounds and echocardiograms.