Description

Clinical Applications

Echocardiography

The Vinno V10 is our leading ultrasound system for small animal echocardiography. We had the opportunity to fly to Frankfurt in June 2024 to work with Vinno and their German distributor in optimising this system (and its cart-based equivalent, the Ultima) for canine and feline heart scanning, and the final result is just breathtaking.

• Colour flow mapping as good or better than systems over double the price, allowing you to precisely see even the smallest or most eccentric regurgitant jets. Our doggy team member, Doppler, always test-drives new machines for us. She has aortic regurgitation and a ventricular septal defect, and the two can be very difficult to distinguish on some machines, particularly for beginners: “there’s just a lot of colour going on!” With the D10, the two jets are perfectly coded, making diagnosis quick, easy, and unequivocal.
• The perfect balance between the fundamental imaging we need for good endocardial definition on echocardiography (vital for performing difficult measurements like wall thickness on cats), and the processing we enjoy when seeing a beautiful image. The D10 will give you heart scans which are neither too “processed” (fake and non-diagnostic), nor too rough, making your echocardiograms an absolute pleasure every single time.

See this example of a dog with mitral regurgitation on the D10:

Abdominal imaging

The D10’s breathtaking abdominal image quality has quickly made it our flagship model for our abdominal ultrasound training courses. With presets to suit everyone, you can easily switch between a high-contrast or high grey scale image. What’s more, the high resolution of the D10’s transducers, typically found in machines double the price, makes identifying typically challenging structures (like the adrenals) a breeze!

The above images are taken using a microconvex probe, as our most popular configuration for small animal veterinarians is with a microconvex and phased array transducer. If you would like to see images from the linear or any other probe type, please just ask.

Research Applications

Vinno offers a serious yet cost-effective alternative to expensive research ultrasound machines, with not only the transducer sizes and frequencies essential for working with tiny animals, but also the advanced technologies that really make a difference to research work. We have tested our specially configured machines on several occasions against high-ticket research ultrasound systems, and both we and our clients have been delighted at the performance. If you have a research need and would like to test the D10 or any other system that we stock, please just ask.

Super Micro Flow

Conventional transducers lack the sensitivity required to detect low amplitude flow or tissue movement in tiny, narrow vessels, which is particularly the case in rodents. We have partnered with Vinno to expand our offering to research labs, enabling you to branch into new areas, such as myocardial tissue imaging and echocardiographic speckle tracking in rats and mice, or imaging uterine blood flow in early pregnancy confirmation.

Our in-house sonographers are specialists in small animal pregnancy ultrasound and echocardiography, and we would love to help you achieve your research goals.

You provide the research project, Vinno provides the technology, we provide the ultrasound expertise!

Targeted cavitation microbubble therapy

Vinno’s Vflash system can be used for targeted cavitation therapy and reperfusion imaging, and has multiple future applications, including cancer treatment. This is still an area of active research and development, and you can read a recent publication using Vinno’s Vflash system here: Sononeoperfusion effect by ultrasound and microbubble promotes nitric oxide release to alleviate hypoxia in a mouse MC38 tumor model.

Ultrasound AI expertise to help you with data analysis

Measuring ultrasound images is time-consuming, expensive, and challenging in terms of reproducibility. In the tiniest of animals, even the smallest measurement errors can have a big effect. If you running a trial over a number of years, or a trial with a lot of data to analyse, and are looking to improve your measurement and reporting speed and reproducibility, please speak with us about using our tried-and-tested platform to train and validate your own neural networks to aid with data analysis. We provide consultancy services to private companies and academia, so that you can use our pipeline to train and build your own AI.

Relevant publications:

• Development and validation of AI for left ventricular diameter measurements in humans (published 2021), and in dogs (published 2024).
• Vendor-neutral, automated global longitudinal strain (published 2024).