dr. kevin keegan | Horse Racing Free Tips

When Ronnie, a 2,000-pound draft horse owned by an Amish family in Clark, Missouri, started having trouble breathing, he was taken to the University of Missouri College of Veterinary Medicine. There, equine veterinarian Joanne Kramer surgically created a hole in the horse's windpipe to help him breathe easier and bypass a permanent airway obstruction.

However, there was still an issue holding Ronnie back. He was a working horse and needed to be in top physical shape to meet the demands of his daily farm tasks.

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“After the tracheotomy, Ronnie was just fine walking around, but he had some extra skin around the hole in the windpipe that kept flapping into the hole when he was out on his family's farm plowing the fields, causing him to tire very easily,” said Kevin Keegan, a professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine that oversaw Ronnie's recovery. “What we needed was some type of device to put in the windpipe hole that would allow air to come in while still blocking out the extra skin, dust and bugs.”

So, Keegan teamed up with two undergraduate students in the MU College of Engineering, who are also members of MU's 3D printing club. The collaboration resulted in an innovative solution that highlights the power of precision medicine, one of the key cornerstones of the NextGen Precision Health Initiative.

“We created a device using thermoplastic polyurethane filament, which is a flexible material,” said Holly Anderson, a senior from St. Louis majoring in biomedical engineering. “Most filaments tend to be much harder and stiffer, but we needed something we could squeeze into the horse's trachea that wouldn't crack or deform over time.”

After the first prototype was created, Keegan and the students tried to schedule a meeting with Ronnie's owner, but that turned out trickier than expected because the Amish traditionally do not use cell phones or other forms of technology.

A woman who serves as an intermediary between the Amish community in Clark and the general public was able to help Keegan and the students arrange a time for the visit. But soon after arriving on the farm, they realized the device was too big for Ronnie's hole in the windpipe.

“So, we knew we needed to make some adjustments,” said Griffen Mustion, a junior from Springfield, Missouri, who is majoring in biomedical engineering. “I stuck my fingers into the gap of the horse's throat to see how deep it was, and then we went back to the 3D printing lab to make some tweaks to the device's size, height and depth.”

Eventually, the students found the perfect balance between making the device stiff enough to stay in place, but flexible enough to bend and expand to the right fit. They returned to the Amish farm and successfully inserted the device into Ronnie's trachea, which drastically improved his breathing and allowed him to resume his farm duties with the rest of the draft horses.

“This was a great opportunity to combine my passion for 3D printing with an opportunity to help a patient,” Anderson said. “I've always been interested in how prosthetics can help in the area of biomedical engineering and being able to improve the health of Ronnie the horse was pretty cool, too.”

Mustion added that while the patient was a 2,000 pound horse in this case, the project showcased how 3D printers can be utilized in precision medicine to help animals or people with various health issues.

“3D printing allows you to customize your product so that it fits the patient perfectly,” Mustion said. “With rapid prototyping, you can make tweaks until the product is how you want it, and that ties into precision medicine because we want to design solutions for patients that meet their needs exactly.”

Keegan, who has been an equine veterinarian at MU for the past 30 years, has recently been contacted by a horse owner in Texas with a similar problem to Ronnie's, and the team is now collaborating on another custom device to see if they can help.

“I think this project showed that custom devices for each animal are the way to go moving forward,” Keegan said. “Rather than a one-size-fits-all solution, we can measure the hole in each horse's trachea after the tracheotomy and 3D print a prototype to see if the device fits. I'm just doing my job, but it was a team effort, and I am happy to help.”

Read more at University of Missouri.

The post 3D Printer Gives A Draft Horse Reason To Breathe Easier appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.

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In recent years it has become clear to veterinarians and researchers studying injury rates in racehorses that serious injuries probably don't happen out of the blue. Major injuries are now commonly believed to be the result of minor injuries going undetected until they accumulate or worsen. One of the reasons those minor issues can easily go unseen is that the first defense for soundness monitoring for most horses is still a visual exam from a trainer or veterinarian or an assessment from a seasoned rider. Horses are very good at compensating for minor problems however, and small changes in their movement can often be imperceptible to the human eye.

Some experts are hopeful that sensor systems may help pick up what the human eye cannot. At a special virtual edition of the annual Tex Cauthen Memorial Seminar held on Jan. 24, several veterinarians provided updates on research into the use of data from systems like the Lameness Locator and StrideMASTER on the racetrack.

So far, the consensus seems to be that both systems provide veterinarians useful information but they're still learning how to contextualize that information.

Dr. Abigail Haffner presented data from a recently-concluded study at Thistledown Race Course which is still being analyzed. Researchers placed Lameness Locator sensors on horses and watching them jog about 25 strides in hand. The Lameness Locator uses sensors on the horse's head, pelvis, and right front pastern which contain accelerometers and gyroscopes. Together, the sensors develop a sense of the horse's “gait signature” or its normal way of going.

The study measured 73 horses weekly over several weeks, with a total of 1,663 exams performed. The horses were selected based on voluntary participation of their trainers, which also meant that horses dropped out of the study for reasons that weren't always known to the study team – like whether the horse had left the barn because it was claimed, or because it had developed an injury and been sent for lay-up or retirement.

None of the horses in the study suffered fatal injuries.

What Haffner and her team learned was that the process of using the system in a practical, racetrack setting is pretty easy – each reading takes three to four minutes and the sensors were simple to apply correctly.

She is hopeful the data may tell her more about how good the system is at noticing changes that were indicative of impending injury. Due to conformational differences, horses may not always move in a perfectly symmetrical way without an injury actually being present, which can sometimes complicate lameness exams.

Dr. Kevin Keegan, professor of veterinary medicine and surgery at the University of Missouri, said he's hopeful for the system's potential to help horses, but does admit it has limitations.

When used for these repeated measurements over time, the Lameness Locator is best at showing existing asymmetries of movement and changes to the horse's movement — but it can't tell you why those asymmetries exist.

“We are measuring a clinical sign, not a disease,” said Keegan “You can define lameness as a movement that's different from normal … lameness may have many causes, but the cause we're most interested in is physical pain.”

If it's put on a horse who already has mild underlying lameness, it will show areas where the horse's body travels asymmetrically but the interpreter won't know if that's a horse's pain-free, normal way of going or if there's an underlying problem.

A horse demonstrates the bonnet portion of the Lameness Locator, which has a sensor at the poll to detect head movement

Bilateral lameness, or lameness occurring in two legs at a time, is even more difficult to capture with the human eye than lameness in a single leg. Keegan says it's possible for the Lameness Locator to detect this, although it is more challenging. Many people assume that a horse will swap weight evenly between the left and right limbs in a bilateral lameness to avoid pain, but it's usually not that precise. Keegan said that sooner or later, the sensors are going to pick up changes in the head and pelvic movements that will point to that swapping.

The process of studying systems like this one has also shown veterinarians that the current way of doing pre-race lameness exams can be less than ideal. Horses are walked or jogged without a rider on board, and can often be fractious, which interferes with their movement. Keegan pointed to Mongolian Groom as a classic example of the variability you could have between multiple exams conducted at the barn versus on the track. He believes a sensor on the ill-fated colt during a jog on the track may have provided a different set of information than the vet checks the horse passed at the barn before the 2019 Breeders' Cup Classic.

Dr. Bronte Forbes, veterinarian with the Singapore Turf Club, said the Lameness Locator has been used in that country to assess poor performers post-race, helping officials flag which ones need further assessment.

“If you're going to consider using this technology as a regulatory tool, everyone has to buy into it,” Forbes said.

Horsemen really believed in the technology in Singapore, Forbes said, and would sometimes request a reading if they had a horse they were worried about.

Still, Forbes said, he has concerns about the best way to work the technology into a regulatory system. He worries that a pre-race use of the technology could lead to a liability issue if it records asymmetry that the trainer or veterinarian believes is just a horse's gait signature, and the horse subsequently breaks down. Likewise, if a horse breaks down in a jurisdiction where the technology is used post-race, many people may have legitimate questions as to why it wasn't used as a screening tool.

Also, Forbes agreed with Keegan, the sensors provide information, but not context, and veterinarians must be aware of the difference.

“It's a measure of asymmetry, and there is no line in the sand currently that determines whether that horse is lame or whether that horse is going to sustain an injury or not – and that's especially true for a one-off assessment of the horse,” he said. “We've all seen very sound horses injure themselves and lame horses not injure themselves. I think we'll establish a welfare level of 'It's not acceptable to send this horse out there.'”

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